scholarly journals Subjunctive Mood in the Altai Language

Author(s):  
A. A. Ozonova

Semantics of subjunctive mood are expressed in most Turkic languages, however, subjunctive mood itself is not always included in the system of grammatical mood forms in descriptive grammars of specific languages. Analytical forms consisting of future tense participles of the main verbs and past tense forms of the auxiliary verbs serve as subjunctive mood markers in Turkic languages (excluding Khakas). In the following article, we analyze the structure, semantics, and functioning of the Altai subjunctive mood. The following analytical forms serve as subjunctive mood markers: -ar/-bas edi и -ɣaj/-baɣaj edi. The first form consists of the future-present tense participial form with -ar/-bas and the auxiliary verb e- ‘to be, to become’ in the past tense form with -di; the second one consists of the desiderative form -ɣaj and the same auxiliary verb e- ‘to be, to become’ in the past tense form with -di. The form -ar/-bas edi is the base form actively functioning as expression of subjunctive mood. In the Altai language, subjunctive mood functions actively in conditional and, less commonly, in conditional-concessive constructions. Subjunctive mood marks the main parts of these constructions and predicates in simple sentences. Subjunctive mood denotes contrafactive situations in the past, and hypothetical situations in the future. Contrafactive situations are not real. They never happened in the past, do not exist in the present, and will not take place in the future. The subjunctive form -ar/-bas edi as a finite predicate in simple sentences also expresses the meaning of non- categoricalness, which is used in dialogues in order to soften the speaker\s declaration of intent or to make a statement less categorical.

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Paul Stemberger

ABSTRACTWhen children produce regularizations likecomed, not all verbs are equally likely to be regularized. Several variables (e.g. lexical frequency) have been shown to be relevant, but not all the variability between verbs is understood. It is argued here that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form. Using a notion of recessive vs. dominant vowel (where recessive vowels are more likely to be replaced by dominant vowels than vice versa) based on adult phonological processing, it is predicted that regularizations should be likely when the base vowel is dominant and unlikely when the past tense vowel is dominant. Data from 17 children reported in the literature, aged 1;6–5;6, show that this prediction is correct. Implications for the role of phonological variables in the processing of irregular past tense forms are discussed.


Author(s):  
Anna Kupść ◽  
Jesse Tseng

This paper presents an analysis of constructions involving the l-form of the verb in Polish, including primarily the past tense, the conditional mood, and the future tense. Previous approaches have attempted to treat these uniformly as auxiliary verb constructions. We argue against a unified treatment, however, in light of synchronic and diachronic evidence that indicates that only the future tense and the conditional still involve auxiliaries in modern Polish. We show that the past tense is now a simple tense, although the l-forms appear in combination with agreement affixes that can appear in different places in the sentence. We provide an account of the common linearization properties of the past tense markings and the conditional auxiliary. We present a detailed HPSG analysis of the past tense construction that relies on the introduction of two interacting agreement features. We then discuss the consequences of our proposals for the analysis of the conditional and future auxiliary constructions, and finally, we offer a treatment of constructions involving inflected complementizers in Polish.


Author(s):  
Olga Nikolaevna Selezneva

The article raises the question of ambiguity of Future in the Past in expressing the future tense in the modern English language. The author of the article analyzes should/would + infinitive, its grammatical status and the expressed lexical meaning. The article notes that ambiguity of Future in the Past is mainly due to the homonymy of should/would + infinitive forms with the forms of the subjunctive mood. However, Future in the Past is a part of the verb system of tenses in the modern English language and it expresses assumption, intention or obligation to perform a future action from the past position.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-431
Author(s):  
Lidia Napiórkowska

Abstract This article presents a new perspective on the meaning and function of the Syriac construction hwayt qāṭēl used with a non-past reference. Beginning with the traditional method of cross-linguistic comparison, the author contextualizes the construction in question within a pragmatic- cognitive framework of general linguistics, an approach that has so far been largely overlooked in Syriac studies. The language used here for comparison is the literary Christian of Urmi, a modern dialect of Aramaic, whose verbal system presents itself as a valid typological parallel for Syriac. Thus, through analysing the renditions of hwayt qāṭēl in Christian Urmi Neo-Aramaic within the corpus of the New Testament, the semantics and function of the Syriac hwayt qāṭēl receive precise characteristics, followed by an attempt to explain the use of the past tense form hwayt (perfect) for the present-future reference. An additional brief treatment of other command-related forms in Syriac, such as the imperative and imperative-derived constructions, contributes further, more detailed observations on the Syriac verbal system.


MANUSYA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Suriya Sriphrom ◽  
Theeraporn Ratitamkul

This cross-sectional study investigated the use of the simple past tense form by twenty Thai learners of English at two levels of proficiency. A cloze test developed by Ayoun and Salaberry (2008) was adopted. The findings showed that the learners in the high proficiency group used the past tense form more accurately than the learners in the low proficiency group. When verbs were categorized according to lexical aspect, both groups of learners were found to use the simple past tense form most often with telic events as well as with states. This did not correspond to the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis, which asserts that low-level learners tend to use the simple past tense form with telic events first. The distributional bias in the input could account for the pattern found in this study.


Author(s):  
Andrew Spencer

The chapter presents an overview of phenomena which pose important problems of description and analysis. I focus on the inflectional system, which has undergone severe attrition and shows idiosyncrasies typical of such systems. For nominals I describe the personal pronoun paradigm and the ‘possessive -s’ clitic/phrasal affix. The controversial categorial status of adverbs in -ly is discussed, while for verbs, all the subcategories prove to be highly problematical. For instance, only 50 irregular verbs distinguish past tense from past participle (e.g. wrote/written), so it is not even clear whether the past participle category is a highly restricted subcategory, with the vast majority of verbs showing past tense/past participle syncretism, or whether this is a case of ‘overdifferentiation’, like the forms am, are, were of the verb BE. On the other hand, the polyfunctionality of the completely regular -ing suffix, which derives verb, noun, and adjective forms, also poses serious unresolved problems. Auxiliary verbs and related phenomena alternate between periphrastic, clitic, and genuinely morphological (affixal) constructions. The chapter concludes with consideration of those aspects of derivational morphology which seem to be indisputably productive, hence part of the grammar, including (certain types of) event nominalization, some cases of double object alternation, and morphosemantic mismatches of the kind electrical engineering ⇒ electrical engineer.


1998 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Theo Janssen

Abstract. This article assumes that tenses in English and Dutch are non-time-based. A verb in the present tense form signals 'verb-in-this-context-of-situation', whereas a verb in the past tense form signals 'verb-in-that-context-of-situation'. It is argued here that the non-time-based analysis of tenses is particularly relevant in cases in which two tense forms should indicate the same time, but have to be interpreted as indicating different times. This discrepancy may occur in the relative use of tenses in various languages (e.g. Classical Greek, Old Irish, Ngiti, and Russian).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
М. В. Ермолова ◽  

There are two pluperfect forms in Pskov dialects: “to be (past tense) + vši-form” and “to be (past tense) +l-form”. The first one has a resultative meaning and should be considered in the row of other perfective forms with the verb to be in the present tense, future tense and in the form of subjunctive mood. The second one has a meaning of discontinuous past. Apparently, it is a grammeme of the past tense and it is opposed to the “simple” past tense by the meaning of the irrelevance of the action to the present. There are similar systems with two pluperfect forms in other Slavic and non-Slavic languages.


Author(s):  
Antonio Lillo ◽  

The future optative is mainly found in indirect discourse constructions dependent on a past tense main verb, but the indicative form may also appear; so it could be thought that both forms are commutable and that the future optative form would function as the oblique mode of the future indicative. In our opinion, future optative is not a mere doublet of the future indicative or a mere relative timestamp referred to a future situation from the perspective of the past. In Herodotus, the future optative presents the action as an inference referred to a future situation, while in Thucydides, from this inferential value a new value is developed that we could call as of uncertain validity or of non-commitment to truthfulness regarding the fulfillment of the action.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document