Past tense usages in tense-rich and tenseless languages: A contrastive study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masahiko Nose
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Tenseless Languages

scholarly journals Contradictory (forward) lifetime effects and the non-future tense in Mandarin Chinese

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry Yong Chen ◽  
E. Matthew Husband
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tenseless Languages ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Lifetime Effects

Lifetime effects refer to the inferences about the life/death of the individual in sentences with individual-level predicates like ‘Mary is/was blue-eyed’. In English, contradictory lifetime inferences arise when the subject denotes one living and one dead individual (e.g. Saussuredead and Chomskyliving #are/??were both linguists.), but no such inferences arises in Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been considered “tenseless” due to the lack of past tense morphemes. This paper investigates the online processing of contradictory lifetime effects and presents additional empirical observations about “forward lifetime effects”, which suggest that both covert past tense and tenseless accounts of Chinese are inadequate for capturing temporal interpretations in this language; instead, finite clauses in Chinese display a Future/Non-Future distinction and are likely to possess a tense node. We discuss our findings in relation to the typology of tense as well as implications for other superficially tenseless languages.

scholarly journals CONDITIONAL SENTENCES IN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-89
Author(s):  
Diana Kartika ◽  
Irma Irma
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conditional Sentence ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This research explores the differences in presupposition patterns in terms of conditions and usage similarities between Japanese and English. This paper uses comparative analysis, and the results show that there are some similarities and differences between Japanese and English conditional sentences. First, conditional clauses exist in both conditional Japanese and English sentences and these clauses have two parts: the ‘if-clause’ as the situation and the ‘main-clause’ as the result. Second, conditional sentences in both languages have similarities in that they express the possibilities and suppositions of the speakers. Third, conditional sentences in Japanese comprise と (-to), ば (-ba), なら (-nara), and たら (-tara) sentences. Fourth, there are three types of conditional sentences in English, namely the conditional that is true in the present/future tense, untrue in the present/future tense, and untrue in the past tense. Fifth, the conditional sentence in Japanese using -to, -ba, -tara, and -nara can all be used inherently in the predicate of the clause.

scholarly journals Processing Tenses for the Living and the Dead: A Psycholinguistic Investigation of Lifetime Effects in Tensed and “Tenseless” Languages

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry Yong Chen
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Surface Form ◽  
Temporal Reference ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Binary Feature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tenseless Languages ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Lifetime Effects

Lifetime effects refer to the inferences about the life/death of the individual in sentences like ‘Mary is/was blue-eyed’. In English, contradictory lifetime inferences arise when the subject denotes one living and one dead individual, as neither tense is appropriate for the English copular, whereas no such intuition arises in Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been considered “tenseless” due to the lack of grammaticalised tense morphemes. In this thesis, I argue, with psycholinguistic evidence from online processing of contradictory lifetime inferences as well as empirical observations about "forward lifetime effects", that both covert past tense and tenseless accounts of Chinese are inadequate for capturing the temporal interpretations in this language: (1) Chinese speakers encountered reading time disruption for sentences with contradictory lifetime inferences, even though such sentences are judged as acceptable in an offline task; (2) Chinese bare predicates cannot be used when the subject involves one living and one yet-to-be-born individual. Taken together, these pieces of evidence suggest that the Chinese bare predicates are likely to possess a tense node with a Future/Non-Future distinction. I further suggest that Tense is a universal functional category that possesses a binary feature distinction, with a split between either Past/Non-Past or Future/Non-Future: all languages have a Tense Phrase in their hierarchical structure, although some languages lack overt marking of tense on nominals or verbs (or both). A new theory of tense is needed to account for the cross-linguistic variation on the surface form and the underlying homogeneity of temporal reference in language. (This is a revised version of my thesis.)

Encoding counterfactuality in Chinese, syntactically

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Haiyong Liu
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Past Time ◽  
Tenseless Languages

Abstract In this article, I demonstrate how past time-reference, modality, negation, conditional, and the causal relationship between the protasis and the apodosis work together to generate counterfactuality in Chinese, syntactically. I study two syntactic means that can help construe counterfactuality in Chinese. First, I study the case of the specialized complementizer yaobushi ‘if not for’ based on Ippolito and Su (2009) by arguing that the causal clausal relationship and the overt or covert modality are obligatory in yaobushi counterfactual; in particular, I resort to the inherent negative entailment of the modal adverb cai ‘not until’ that satisfies the exhaustive operator to account for the needed negation in cai apodosis. Second, I propose that a hypothetical conditional clause with a past time-reference guarantees past counterfactuality in Chinese. I extend the morphological past-tense exclusion operator for counterfactuality (Iatridou 2000) to a more general and more pragmatic past time-reference to include tenseless languages like Chinese. I also show the special typological status of past tense and past counterfactual.

Zero Marking of Past Tense in Child African American English

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 173-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lee ◽  
Janna B. Oetting
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Grammatical Function

Zero marking of the simple past is often listed as a common feature of child African American English (AAE). In the current paper, we review the literature and present new data to help clinicians better understand zero marking of the simple past in child AAE. Specifically, we provide information to support the following statements: (a) By six years of age, the simple past is infrequently zero marked by typically developing AAE-speaking children; (b) There are important differences between the simple past and participle morphemes that affect AAE-speaking children's marking options; and (c) In addition to a verb's grammatical function, its phonetic properties help determine whether an AAE-speaking child will produce a zero marked form.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Compound Verbs ◽  
Finite Verb

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.  

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

Obligations of the Translators of the Qur'an Towards the Qur'anic Readings

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-147
Author(s):  
S. K. Tabatabaee
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Syntactical Structure ◽  
The Way

It is historically established that the readers of the Qur'an read certain Qur'anic phrases or words in various ways. Some of these different readings affect the pronunciation of certain words without changing their meanings, e.g. ‘kufuwan aḥad’ where two readings exist: ‘kufuwan aḥad’ with fā' madmūma and wāw maftūha without hamza and ‘kufu'an aḥad’ with hamz and fā' maḍmūma. Other readings, however, may affect the function of a word in a sentence in terms of the syntactical structure of the sentence and the grammatical function of the word, and the way it is to be parsed. This can be observed in ‘mālik yawn al-dīn’ (Q.1:4) where three readings exist: ‘māliki yawmi'l-dīn’, ‘maliki yawmi'l-dīn’ and ‘malaka yawma'l-dīn’, turning mālik into a past tense verb and rendering the word yawm in the nasb mood. Another example can be found in the Qur'anic phrase ‘bi-mā kānū yakdhibūn’ (Q.2:10) where two readings exist: ‘yakdhibūn’ with yā' maftūḥa and single dhāl, and ‘yukadhdhibūn’ with yā' maḍmūma and doubled dhal. This article will focus on the obligations to be undertaken by the translators of the Qur'an in relation to the latter type of Qur'anic readings.

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