scholarly journals A Syntactic Analysis of Arabic Tense and Aspect

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Abdullah S. Al-Dobaian

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.

Author(s):  
Randy Kristoforus Senduk ◽  
Sanerita T. Olii ◽  
Sarah Kamagi

This study aimed to reveal affixes' form and meaning in Tombulu language tenses, especially on past, present, and future tenses. Descriptive qualitative method used with applying Arikunto's procedure of collecting data which were interview and documentation. While, in analyzing data used Miles & Huberman which consisted of data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. This study showed that there were different functions of Affixes in the tenses of Tombulu language and English. The simple past tense was Infix -im- and -in-, which were placed after vocal or consonant phonemes. Simple present tense with Prefix mah- which was located to the beginning of the word. Simple future tense with Infix -um-, which was placed after vocal or consonant phonemes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nita Rustanti

Tense and aspect are one of the most important part on languange grammar. It used on everyday conversation so understanding it are a must for foreign languange learners, but it can be difficult to them because not all of languange have tense and aspect. This study aims to describe similarities and differences of tense and aspect on shunkan doushi  in Bahasa and Japanese. This study uses a contrastive analysis method by taking data from various sources. The result of this study are 1) the similarities between them are temporary adverbial can be used in both of languange. Meanwhile, the differences between them are 2) there is changes on the verb in Japanese meanwhile, in Bahasa there is no changes. 3) In this study, tenses on Japanese shunkan doushi, it can be used only for past tense and future tense, meanwhile in Bahasa it can be used on past tense, simple tense and future tense, 4)  in this study, all of the aspect on Japanese are kigentai which mean an ending, meanwhile in Bahasa it can be an ending, progressive, continuative or repetitive.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Tajudin Nur

This research was a qualitative research using structural linguistic method. The findings showed that the conjugation of the perfect verbs (ma>dhi) into imperfect verbs (mudha>ri’) can reveal the concept of semantic time and aspect. It was found that the conjugation of verb from perfect (ma>dhi) to imperfect (mudha>ri’) expresses semantical concept of tense and aspect. Perfect verb expresses past tense, present tense, future tense, and perfective aspect, while imperfect verb expresses present tense, future tense, and imperfective aspect. The other constituents which had a role in expressing tense and aspect were auxiliary verb of kana, the particles of qad, sawfa, lan, and sa- prefix. The auxiliary verb of kana had a role to express past tense in the case of equational sentence or if it precedes imperfect verb, while if it precedes  perfect verb, it expresses perfective aspect. The particle of qad expresses perfective aspect if it precedes perfect verb (ma>dhi), while the particle of sawfa, lan, and sa- prefix express future tense. In addition, to clarify the tense in Arabic adverb of time standing beside the verb also was used.


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.


Author(s):  
Evgeniya A. Korshunova ◽  

The article explores poetics of the unpublished Easter story by S.N. Durylin “On an unrelated grave” (1922). The story is important mainly because the author manages to renew the genre not only by returning to the original spiritual meanings, but also presenting the unique ontological project. Taking into account the experience of the predecessors-classics, first of all, A.P. Chekhov and his story “Holy night” (1886), the writer expands possibilities of the biblical subtext by creating an intertextual evangelical plot that unfolds in parallel with the main one. Using modernist experience of L.N. Andreev and M. Gorky, the symbolist writers, Durylin disputes it, disagreeing with travesty and fantastic versions of the interpretation of Easter story. The author depicts the plot of the resurrection of the soul of the main character Andrei Omutov, who, experiencing the tragic death of his mother, thinks about eternity for the first time. The author’s ontological concept, affirming infinity and the absence of boundaries, is expressed by the special construction of the temporal triad “past — present — future”. The idea of transcendental reality, suggesting Absolute, is formed by alternating passages in present and future tense: these are descriptions of mother’ existence and church hymns quotations. In the past tense, the story of hero’s childhood and his mother’s death are given. The spiritual path to the eternal “to be” represents the inner plot of this story. The milestones of this plot are intertextually indicated by Easter exapostillarium, which is quoted three times: in the epigraph, at the time when it sounds at Easter services and, finally, on a grave of a stranger during matin service, conducted by Father Alexander, when the hero’s spiritual resurrection occurs.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 359-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Seeker ◽  
Özlem Çetinoğlu

Space-delimited words in Turkish and Hebrew text can be further segmented into meaningful units, but syntactic and semantic context is necessary to predict segmentation. At the same time, predicting correct syntactic structures relies on correct segmentation. We present a graph-based lattice dependency parser that operates on morphological lattices to represent different segmentations and morphological analyses for a given input sentence. The lattice parser predicts a dependency tree over a path in the lattice and thus solves the joint task of segmentation, morphological analysis, and syntactic parsing. We conduct experiments on the Turkish and the Hebrew treebank and show that the joint model outperforms three state-of-the-art pipeline systems on both data sets. Our work corroborates findings from constituency lattice parsing for Hebrew and presents the first results for full lattice parsing on Turkish.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE B. LEONARD ◽  
PATRICIA DEEVY

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.


2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid De Wit ◽  
Frank Brisard

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.


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.


2015 ◽  
pp. 347
Author(s):  
Teresa Torres Bustamante

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.


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