scholarly journals Sequence of optional tense

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 636 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ryan Bochnak

In English, sentences containing a past tense in the complement clause of a past-marked propositional attitude predicate (e.g, John said Mary was sick) are ambiguous between a simultaneous and a back-shifted reading, in a phenomenon known as Sequence of Tense. In languages like Japanese, only a shifted reading is available for such past-under-past sentences. Two families of theories have been proposed in the literature to account for this variation: structural and pragmatic. Structural accounts rely on a syntactic rule or licensing condition to derive simultaneous readings of embedded clauses. Pragmatic accounts rely on competition between past and present tense in embedded clauses to derive the readings. In this paper, I provide new data from Washo, an optional tense language, to weigh in on these theories. In Washo, both tensed and (past-oriented) tenseless embedded clauses can have simultaneous and back-shifted readings. I argue that structural approaches can account for the Washo generalizations fairly straightforwardly, while pragmatic approaches encounter difficulties. The result is that the distribution of simultaneous readings cross-linguistically is more fruitfully viewed as a syntactic phenomenon rather than a pragmatic one.

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Leo Candra Wahyu Utami

Rhetoric in writing an abstract is required for the writers’ goal which is to deliver adequate information to the readers by implementing an appropriate compositional structure of the abstract.<strong> </strong>This study aims to explore the use of grammatical construction of every rhetorical move in the research article abstracts. The result showed that grammatical constructions are found in the research article abstracts. The use of present tense is dominant in all five moves. Additionally, past tense is mostly found in method move. Active voice and passive voice are also found in all five moves. However, passive voice is frequently found in method and conclusion. In this case, the writers construct the abstract as objective as possible. <em>That-</em>complement clause is characteristically found in product move. Thus, implementation of this study is beneficial for the writers in academic writing to realize the use of grammatical constructions in the research article abstracts.


2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 848-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Hansson ◽  
Ulrika Nettelbladt ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard

Several competing proposals have been offered to explain the grammatical difficulties experienced by children with specific language impairment (SLI). In this study, the grammatical abilities of Swedish-speaking children with SLI were examined for the purpose of evaluating these proposals and offering new findings that might be used in the development of alternative accounts. A group of preschoolers with SLI showed lower percentages of use of present tense copula forms and regular past tense inflections than normally developing peers matched for age and younger normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). Word order errors, too, were more frequent in the speech of the children with SLI. However, these children performed as well as MLU-matched children in the use of present tense inflections and irregular past forms. In addition, the majority of their sentences containing word order errors showed appropriate use of verb morphology. None of the competing accounts of SLI could accommodate all of the findings. In particular, these accounts—or new alternatives —must develop provisions to explain both the earlier acquisition of present tense inflections than past tense inflections and word order errors that seem unrelated to verb morphology.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 248-258
Author(s):  
Jittra Muta ◽  
Nutprapha Dennis

The purposes of this study were to analyze and describe English tenses used in an online news website and to examine which types of English tenses are frequently used in an online news website. The material in this study was 20 news in Mini-Lessons from B r e a k I n g N e w s E n g l i s h .c o m. The research instrument was a checklist which determines and categorizes English tenses as past tense, present tense, and future tense. The data collections were analyzed with the frequency and percentage. The research findings of the study showed that all using of English tenses in the 20 news from the Mini-Lessons were 279 sentences; past tense were 155 sentences (56%), present tense were 120 sentences (43%), and future tense were 4 sentences (1%). The most English tenses aspect of the news were past simple tense and present tense; past simple tense, present simple tense, present perfect tense, and present progressive tense, respectively. In contrast, breaking news used the least English tenses aspect of the news was past perfect tense, future simple tense, past progressive tense, present perfect progressive tense, and future perfect tense, while there were no used past perfect progressive tense, future progressive tense, future perfect tense, and future perfect progressive tense in the 20 selected breaking news.


LUNAR ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Dilla Ayuning Pangestu

Writing cannot be separated from sentences. Constructing sentences is astart to write a composition since it has levels of difficulties starting from wordsto sentences, sentences to paragraph and paragraph to longer composition.Jumbled words is a method of teaching. There are some words or sentenceswhich are jumbled by teacher and the students must arrange them intocorrect sentences. This research is a descriptive quantitative one that focusedon the data analysis with form description with the scoring of the eight gradestudents’ grammatical errors in arranging jumbled words into meaningfulsentences at SMP Negeri 4Banyuwangi in the Academic Year 2016/2017. Purposive method was used todetermine the research area. The number of respondent were 30 students.The result of the data analysis showed that compose sentences was difficultfor the eight year students of SMP Negeri 4 Banyuwangi. (1) There are 126miordering of using adjective followed by noun with the percentage 23,37%.(2) There are 46 misordering of using verb followed byadverb with the percentage 8,53%. (3) There are 98 misordering of usingauxiliary verb ( do, do es and did )with the percentage 18,18%, (4) There are 95 misordering of using to be pasttense (was and were) with the percentage 17,62%. (5) There are75misordering of using Simple Present Tense with the percentage 13,91%. (6)There are 99 misordering of using Simple Past Tense with the percentage18,36%


Author(s):  
Gustavo Guajardo

Abstract This paper examines the use of the three non-periphrastic subjunctives in Spanish in embedded clauses under obligatory subjunctive predicates in the past tense in three Spanish varieties: Argentinean, Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. By means of random forest and logistic regression analyses, I demonstrate that a grammar where the two “past” subjunctives make up one group, such that the variation can be modeled on a binary opposition between (morphologically) past vs. (morphologically) present, achieves better prediction accuracy and goodness-of-fit parameters than a grammar with a three-way split. The results suggest that, at least in complement clauses of obligatory subjunctive predicates, there appear to be no semantic differences between the two past subjunctives but there are still relatively large differences in how the three subjunctive forms are used across the three Spanish varieties studied.1


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-304
Author(s):  
Reiko Ikeo

Over the past decade, more and more writers have used the present tense as the primary tense for their fictional narratives. This article shows that contemporary present-tense fiction has more lexical and syntactic characteristics which are similar to spoken discourse than past-tense fiction by comparing lexis and structures in two corpora: a corpus consisting of present-tense narratives and a corpus of past-tense narratives. It also discusses how the use of the present tense affects the management of viewpoint in narrative by relating its lexical, structural characteristics to the presentation of characters’ speech and thoughts.


1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Sprigg
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

Tibetan orthography looks phonetically challenging, to say the least; and one may well wonder whether such tongue-twisting combinations as the brj of brjes, the blt- of bltas, or the bst- of bstan ever did twist a Tibetan tongue, or whether the significance of these and other such orthographic forms might not have been morphophonemic in origin, with the letters r, l, and s in the syllable initial of forms such as these serving to associate these past-tense forms lexically with their corresponding present-tense forms; e.g. Viewed in relation to Tibetan orthography the past-tense forms of a class of verbs in the Golok dialect seem to support this hypothesis. Table 1, below, contains a number of examples of Golok verbs in their past-tense and present-tense forms to illustrate a type of phonological analysis suited to that view of the r syllable-initial unit in the Golok examples, and, indirectly, in the WT examples too (the symbols b and b will be accounted for in section (B) below).


Probus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Saab

AbstractIn this paper, I present a new case of overgeneration for the semantic view on identity in ellipsis. Concretely, I show that a radical version of the semantic approach to the identity condition on ellipsis, in particular, one with the notion of mutual entailment at its heart, wrongly predicts as grammatical cases of TP-ellipsis in Spanish where a (formal) present tense feature on T in the antecedent entails a (formal) past tense feature in the elliptical constituent and vice versa. However, this is not attested: present tense cannot serve as a suitable antecedent for formal past tense in TP-ellipsis contexts, regardless of pragmatic entailment. On the basis of this and other new observations in the realm of tense and ellipsis, several consequences for the theory of identity in ellipsis, on the one hand, and the proper representation of tense in natural languages, on the other, are also discussed.


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