Past Tense and Aspect in Modern Greek for Language Learning

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are sensitive to completion cues in their comprehension of tense. In two experiments, children with SLI (ages 4 ; 1 to 6 ; 4) and typically developing (TD) children (ages 3 ; 5 to 6 ; 5) participated in a sentence-to-scene matching task adapted from Wagner (2001). Sentences were in either present or past progressive and used telic predicates. Actions were performed twice in succession; the action was either completed or not completed in the first instance. In both experiments, the children with SLI were less accurate than the TD children, showing more difficulty with past than present progressive, regardless of completion cues. The TD children were less accurate with past than present progressive requests only when the past actions were incomplete. These findings suggest that children with SLI may be relatively insensitive to cues pertaining to event completion in past tense contexts.

Download Full-text

Zero verb marking in Sranan

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages ◽

10.1075/jpcl.29.1.01wit ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 1-48 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Astrid De Wit ◽

Frank Brisard

Keyword(s):

Native Speaker ◽

Past Tense ◽

Perfective Aspect ◽

Tense And Aspect ◽

Lexical Aspect ◽

The Past ◽

Corpus Data ◽

Present Tense ◽

Basic Level

In the Surinamese creole language Sranan, verbs in finite clauses that lack overt TMA-marking are often considered to be ambiguous between past and present interpretations (depending on the lexical aspect of the verb involved) or analyzed as having a perfective value. We claim that these verbs are in fact zero-marked, and we investigate the various uses of this zero expression in relation to context and lexical aspect on the basis of corpus data and native speaker elicitations. It is shown that existing analyses do not cover and unify all the various uses of the construction. We propose, as an alternative, to regard the zero form as present perfective marker, whereby tense and aspect are conceived of as fundamentally epistemic categories, in line with Langacker (1991). This combination of present tense and perfective aspect, which is regarded as infelicitous in typological studies of tense and aspect (cf. the ‘present perfective paradox’, Malchukov 2009), gives rise to the various interpretations associated with zero. However, in all of its uses, zero still indicates that, at the most basic level, a situation belongs to the speaker’s conception of ‘immediate reality’ (her domain of ‘inclusion’). This basic ‘presentness’ distinguishes zero from the past-tense marker ben, which implies dissociation.

Download Full-text

Real tense and real aspect in mirativity

Semantics and Linguistic Theory ◽

10.3765/salt.v0i0.2650 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 347

Author(s):

Teresa Torres Bustamante

Keyword(s):

Past Tense ◽

Tense And Aspect ◽

The Past ◽

Current State ◽

Time Argument ◽

Modal Base ◽

State Of Affairs ◽

Lifetime Effects ◽

Usual Interpretation

The goal of this paper is an account of the role of tense and aspect in mirative constructions in Spanish. I propose that the past tense morphology and the imperfect/perfect morphology in Spanish miratives contribute their standard meanings to the semantics of mirativity. I define mirativity as the clash between the speaker’s previous beliefs and the current state of affairs asserted by the proposition. I propose a M operator that relates the speaker’s beliefs and the proposition by ranking the worlds in which the proposition doesn’t hold in the speaker’s previous beliefs as better ones. The past tense is interpreted outside the proposition, and constitutes the time argument of the modal base (doxastic domain). Aspect gets its usual interpretation in the proposition but also in the alternative propositions that order the worlds in the modal base. This way, differences regarding the imperfect mirative and the pluperfect one are accounted for. Finally, the paper also discusses stative miratives, which apparently challenge part of the analysis. I claim that these are not counter examples, but rather confirmation of the analysis, once we account for the interaction between miratives, statives and lifetime effects.

Download Full-text

Initial acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in an artificial language

Second language Research ◽

10.1177/0267658317750219 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 34 (4) ◽

pp. 517-538 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Charles M Mueller

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Second Language Acquisition ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Past Tense ◽

Artificial Language ◽

Aspect Hypothesis ◽

Tense And Aspect ◽

Lexical Aspect ◽

Initial Acquisition ◽

Early Acquisition

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers’ ( n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames during their early acquisition of a miniature artificial language. Participants completed a lesson in which types and tokens of lexical aspect and past and present morphology were balanced. Although significant effects at p < .05 were found for lexical aspect and morphological marking, the interaction between these factors, expected by the aspect hypothesis, was non-significant. The experiment suggests that the effects of lexical aspect may be absent during the earliest phases of second language acquisition or may be due to factors methodologically excluded in this study such as distributional biases in second language input.

Download Full-text

Effectiveness of CALL in Teaching Modern Greek as a Second or Foreign Language in Higher Education

The EuroCALL Review ◽

10.4995/eurocall.2011.16290 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 18 ◽

pp. 43

Author(s):

Georgia Kafka

Keyword(s):

Foreign Language ◽

Language Learning ◽

Information And Communication Technologies ◽

Teaching Method ◽

Computer Assisted ◽

Greek Language ◽

University Environment ◽

Modern Greek ◽

Interdisciplinary Field ◽

Information And Communication

<p>The need for teaching foreign languages has led to the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field named CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) in the 1980s. In the 1990s teaching the Modern Greek language as a second or foreign language (L2) has followed the wide-spread use of Information and Communication Technologies. CALL courseware started to play a significant role in the Modern Greek teaching university environment of the last decade, and especially in the effectiveness of learning processes and the increasing interest of the learners. The effectiveness of this software in the learning environment is difficult to measure because there are concerns about the technical support and the training of the language instructors in computer use and the CALL courseware implementation. Nevertheless the progress of the learners can be estimated although it is difficult to conclude if this progress is due to a good teaching method or a good CALL courseware or is a measure of both.</p>

Download Full-text

Translating linguistic time

Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies ◽

10.52034/lanstts.v7i.211 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

Author(s):

Tal Goldfajn

Keyword(s):

Classical Problem ◽

Hard Core ◽

Biblical Hebrew ◽

Past Tense ◽

Narrative Texts ◽

Tense And Aspect ◽

Single Form ◽

Modern Hebrew ◽

Major Trend ◽

Original Story

If Sartre is right and the tense of a text holds the key to its special strangeness (1947), how does this strangeness fare in translation? What can we learn from looking at the translation of grammatical tense and aspect in narrative texts in different languages? It is often simply assumed that translating grammatical cate gories of time in languages - because it has to do with what is considered the hard core of language, i.e. the grammar as opposed to the lexicon of the language - mainly involves mere linguistic constraints. Jakobson ’s famous motto (1987: 433) - “languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they can convey”- would therefore suffice to tell the whole story about the way in which linguistic time is translated. This paper argues, however, that this is not the whole story: it argues that the choice of tense in translation is more than just a grammatical agenda, and may actually reflect a number of different commitments. Section 2 examines some intriguing tense changes in the translation of children ’s literature: it discusses the motivations behind these changes and shows that by changing the ‘how’ of the original story through the tense choice the entire subjective perspective of the text is altered. Section 3 identifies a few patterns in the translation of past distinctions in Modern Hebrew. It suggests that in contrast to the more diversified means of translating aspectual meanings in previous decades, a major trend in the last decade or so has been to reduce all past sphere distinctions essentially to one single form, i.e. the simple past tense. Finally section 4 deals with the classical problem regarding the Biblical Hebrew tenses and their translation; it shows that the translation of the biblical verbs may be strongly determined by the different linguistic ideas (and even systematic theories) the translators adopt regarding the Biblical Hebrew tenses. In all these cases then, we observe that the translation of temporal meanings involves not only a commitment to specific temporal interpretations but also a commitment to more subtle conceptions of subjectivity in translation, of literary conventions and linguistic ideas.

Download Full-text

A Syntactic Analysis of Arabic Tense and Aspect

Advances in Language and Literary Studies ◽

10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.6p.82 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (6) ◽

pp. 82

Author(s):

Abdullah S. Al-Dobaian

Keyword(s):

Morphological Analysis ◽

Syntactic Analysis ◽

Past Tense ◽

Future Tense ◽

Tense And Aspect ◽

Comprehensive Theory

I discuss the morphological analysis of tense and aspect proposed by early Arab grammarians and illustrate some of its problems. In order to account for these problems, the Arab grammarians had to relegate the effects of tense and aspect to the morphological forms of faÀal and yafÀal. I show that these forms marked different tense specifications other than the default past tense for faÀal and present or future tense for yafÀal. As for aspect it has only received a sporadic and inconsistent analysis by early Arab grammarians. I agree with Fassi Fehri (1993) and Juhfah (2006) that a comprehensive theory of tense and aspect is essential for Arabic. I propose a syntactic analysis of tense and aspect in Arabic based on MacDonald’s (2008) analysis with some modifications needed to account for the Arabic data. Unlike Fassi Fehri and Juhfah’s analyses, this analysis is based on the verb interaction with its arguments and modifiers in which the verb checks tense and aspect syntactically by moving to functional projections: aspect phrase and tense phrase. I argue that such syntactic analysis consistently explains the interaction of tense and aspect in Arabic and their relevant specifications.

Download Full-text