Third-Person Narratives: Floating Weed and The Mismatch: The Restoration of “-ta” Expressing the Past Tense

2014 ◽  
pp. 124-152
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Deptuchowa
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

An analysis of examples of the past perfect tense composed of a singular and plural past tense participle and an aorist form of the ‘to be’ verb in the singular third person form used as an auxiliary word is given in the article. The author, referring to the research of W.R. Rzepka, presents three consecutive examples from the mediaeval court oaths, where the aorist by has the meaning of ‘był’ (past form of the to be verb in Polish).


Author(s):  
Liene Markus-Narvila

Virga subdialect is one of the subdialects of Southwestern Kurzeme, which belongs to Semigallian subdialects of the Middle Latvian dialect. The characteristics of Virga subdialect can be traced by using mostly three sources: materials of Latvian folklore, the compiled answers to the questions of the Dialectal Atlas of Latvian collection programme, and collected texts of the subdialects, including the materials of expeditions in Virga subdialect collected in the 21st century. These three sources are the primary material for the article. The phonetic and morphological features of Virga subdialect are generally consistent with the phonetical and morphological features typical throughout the Southwestern Kurzeme region. The sections of the article focus on the typical and most representative features in phonetics and morphology of Virga subdialect and reveal their relationship with the typical features of the subdialects used in the whole area. Phonetics of Virga subdialect is characterised by the use of broad e, ē in infinitives, palatal consonant ŗ, assimilation of ln to ll, the loss of sounds in different positions, anaptyxis, and vowel extension before the consonant r. Morphology of Virga subdialect is characterised by the abbreviation of verbs (ne)būt, (ne)iet in the past tense, the third person; ē-stem substantives; āio-stem verbs; the use of suffix ūz-. In the future, further research of Virga subdialect is important in order to determine the stability of the use of the registered features and register other features of the subdialect. Studies of the nearest neighbouring subdialects should also be carried out to allow a wider scientific in-depth analysis of the subdialects used in the area.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
María del Pilar García Mayo ◽  
Izaskun Villarreal Olaizola

This article examines the third language (L3) developing morphology of 78 Basque—Spanish bilinguals following a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program and a mainstream English as a foreign language (non-CLIL) program. The analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal oral data shows that (1) the omission of inflection in the L3 English interlanguage of these groups of learners is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology, (2) there is a dissociation in frequency of suppliance between suppletive inflection (copula and auxiliary be) and affixal inflection (the third person morpheme -s and the past tense morpheme -ed) already attested in L2 data, and (3) no significant differences were found between the two groups tested as far as the development of suppletive and affixal tense and agreement morphemes. The overall findings seem to support full-UG explanations for the variable use of morphology in the acquisition of non-native systems.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Budts ◽  
Peter Petré

Abstract This paper provides a detailed corpus-based account of the formal and functional changes that be going to underwent in Late Modern English. Despite be going to’s popularity, such studies remain rare for this period, in which the construction’s grammaticalization went through a second phase. Our analysis shows that the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a shift from intention to prediction, which originated in contexts with third person subjects. Reporting the intention of others generally involves a certain amount of guesswork, which eventually resulted in the creation of an additional, epistemic layer of prediction, reinforced by the gradual extension of be going to to express non-imminent future situations. It is argued that this shift involves an increase in subjectivity, as the emphasis gradually moved away from the grammatical subject to the speaker: what mattered was no longer the intentions of the subject, but the knowledge of the speaker about them. Attention is also drawn to parallel developments in other future markers, particularly will. Interestingly, and in spite of significant differences, each of these went through an intermediary stage that involved past tense uses with reference to a future in the past, which was already known to the speaker.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 245-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Widmer

Abstract The epistemic verbal categories “evidentiality” and “egophoricity” play an important role in the verbal systems of many Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas. In the course of the past decades, our synchronic understanding of those grammatical categories has been considerably enhanced by numerous descriptive studies. However, little is still known about the diachronic processes that give rise to evidentiality and egophoricity. The article addresses this gap by discussing evidence from Bunan, a Tibeto-Burman language, for which the development of evidentiality and egophoricity in its past tense system can be reconstructed in detail. It is argued that the evolution of the two categories can be explained by reference to two processes: (i) the reanalysis of a resultative construction as an inferential past tense and (ii) the reanalysis of third person agreement markers as allophoric markers. In addition, it is maintained that the concept of Scalar Quantity Implicature is crucial to account for the evolution of the two categories.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaa’ Mohammad Smadi

This study aims to analyze quantitatively and quantitatively Arabic journal articles’ abstracts written within the field of social sciences. It mainly aims to analyze the lexical and grammatical qualities of the abstracts in the five academic disciplines; Economy, Geography, Psychology, Sociology, and Law,. To achieve the goal of the study, a corpus consisting of 500,000 words was collected from various well-known Arabic journals, and then it was divided into five sub-corpora each of which represented one academic discipline. The Corpus Linguistics approach was applied to this study and the data were analyzed through using WordSmith tools (version 0.7). The quantitative results show that the abstracts in all disciplines show a similar word mean length, i.e. all of them is around (5). Qualitatively speaking, the results show that each discipline has its list of lexical words that are suitable for each discipline's genre. The results also reveal a small amount of variation in terms of the tense of the reporting verbs specifically those which are used in the introductory part of the abstracts. However, the reporting verbs used in the body and the concluding parts of all abstracts are characterized by the past tense, third person, and active voice.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  


Author(s):  
З.И. Годизова ◽  
Д.В. Габисова

Актуальность предпринятого исследования обусловлена тем, что причастие в современном осетинском языке не привлекало активного внимания ученых, имеются лишь общие описания причастий, а специальные исследования, посвященные причастиям, практически отсутствуют. Представляется интересным и актуальным сравнение системы причастий и их грамматических особенностей в осетинском и русском языках. Этот интерес обусловлен принадлежностью сопоставляемых языков к общей индоевропейской семье языков, а также тесным их взаимодействием в условиях двуязычия, что, очевидно, может отразиться и на системе причастий. Научная новизна данной статьи заключается в том, что в ней исследуются грамматические особенности всех разрядов причастий в осетинском языке в сопоставлении с русским языком. На основании проведенного анализа установлено, что в современном осетинском языке система причастий включает пять разрядов, разнообразных в своих грамматических проявлениях, в степени регулярности, в склонности переходить в состав других частей речи. Выявлены наиболее значительные отличия осетинских причастий от русских: существование причастий будущего времени в системе осетинского языка, отсутствие у причастий показателей времени и залога, а также именных грамматических категорий (падежа, числа, рода). Установлено также, что в осетинском языке категория вида в большей степени управляет категорией времени, в силу чего несовершенный вид причастий предполагает только настоящее время, а совершенный только прошедшее отсутствует четкая залоговая оппозиция причастий в осетинском языке. Определено также, что осетинские причастия не имеют членных (полных) форм, но функционируют в роли и сказуемого, и определения, хотя в большей степени тяготеют к предикативной роли. В осетинском языке причастия гораздо менее употребительны сравнительно с причастиями в русском языке и чаще вступают в отношения грамматической омонимии с другими частями речи. The relevance of the undertaken study is determined by the fact that participles in the modern Ossetian language are still insufficiently studied. There are only the most general descriptions of grammar features of participles. The comparison of the system of participles and their grammar features seems interesting and actual, especially considering the fact that the Ossetian and Russian languages belong to different groups of the Indo-European language family. Furthermore, in the context of bilingualism the Russian and Ossetian languages interact actively and that can affect the system of participles. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the fact that it examines the grammatical features of all categories of participles in the Ossetian language in comparison with the Russian language. The conducted research allowed to elicit five categories in the system of participles in the modern Ossetian language. The analysis of the results showed the participles are diverse in their grammatical characteristics, in the degree of regularity, and in the tendency to transition into other parts of speech. The research defined the most significant differences between Ossetian and Russian participles: existence of future participles in the system of the Ossetian language absence of adjectival grammar categories of gender, number and case as well as formal markers of tense and voice in Ossetian participles. The tense category in Ossetian subordinates to the aspect category to a far greater extent therefore the imperfective aspect of participles accepts the present tense forms only, while perfective acts in the past tense forms Ossetian participles lack explicit voice opposition. Ossetian participles do not have full forms, but they can have syntactic functions of both the predicate and the attribute in a sentence, although the predicative function is more typical for them. Participles in the Ossetian language are much less common compared to participles in Russian and are more disposed to conversion (transition to the category of nouns, verbal adverbs, adjectives, words of the state category).


2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ingram ◽  
Donald Morehead

The finding in Morehead and Ingram (1973) that children with a language impairment do better in the use of inflectional morphology than MLU-matched typically developing children has been in marked contrast to several subsequent studies that have found the opposite relationship (cf. review in Leonard, 1998). This research note presents a reanalysis of a subset of the original Morehead and Ingram data in an attempt to reconcile these contradictory findings. The reanalysis revealed that the advantage on inflectional morphology for children with language impairment was only on the progressive suffix, not on plural and possessive or on the verbal morphemes third-person present tense and past tense. The results of the reanalysis are in line with more recent research (e.g., Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995). The resolution of these discrepant results highlights the critical roles that methodological issues play—specifically, how subjects are matched on MLU, how inflectional morphology is measured, and the selection of subjects with regard to age.


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