Past Tense

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  Tense and Aspect in Italian Interlanguage

  • Zuzana Toth(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  4  The acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages

  While chapter 2 focused on the development of linguistic competence and on theories of language acquisition and processing, the present chapter narrows down the focus to the acquisition of a specific subcomponent of linguistic competence, namely grammatical competence, defined as “knowledge of, and ability to use, the grammatical resources of a language” (Council of Europe 2001: 112). The acquisition of temporal and aspectual distinctions in Romance languages will be examined as part of the learner’s grammatical competence.

  The complexity of the temporal and aspectual system in Romance languages derives from the morphological richness of their verbal paradigms and the variety of meanings that each verbal form conveys. This is particularly true for the Past Tense forms, which carry temporal and aspectual meanings, i.e. they not only locate an event on the time axis but also convey information about its “internal temporal constituency” (Comrie 1976 : 5). In example (1) (from Comrie 1976 : 4), the two Past Tense forms express the same temporal information, i.e. they locate the event of reading on the time axis before the moment of speech, but they differ in their aspectual meaning:

  (1)	John read that book yesterday; while he was reading it, the postman came

  In the first clause, the past simple expresses the perfective aspect, meaning that the event is presented as concluded and a “single unanalysable whole” (Comrie 1976 : 3); while in the second clause, the same event is opened up and “reference is made to an internal portion of John’s reading” (Comrie 1976 : 4). Thus, the second verb form conveys the progressive aspect, one of the aspectual meanings that can be expressed by imperfective forms in the Romance languages. In fact, if we translate the sentence into Italian, the verb leggere

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  Tense and Aspects in Discourse

  • Co Vet, Carl Vetters, Co Vet, Carl Vetters(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Further statistical analyses of the distribution of verb forms in Table 3 revealed that the marking on lexical verbs of the basic semantic tense distinc-tion between past vs. present time-sphere is largely independent of any of the three aspectual distinctions investigated. That is, no statistically significant correlation between verb form and aspectual meaning emerged from Table 3. However, it is a fact that contrary to the Past Tense forms, which occur almost exclusively in past time-sphere contexts, present tense forms are more randomly distributed along the past vs. present time-sphere distinction (i. e., they occur in both present and past-time contexts). At least, such is the case for SI where the majority of the verb forms in past-time contexts are, in fact, present tense forms. (In S2, the present tense forms seem to have acquired a more target-like functional range as their occurrence is basically confined to present-time contexts). To allow for a closer inspection of the influence of proposed universal as-pectual notions on the use and acquisition of verbal morphology in Sue's inter-language, all past time-sphere clauses were extracted and all the verb forms were tallied and assigned to either the Past Tense or present tense form cate-gory as defined above (cf. Table 5; figures involve lexical verbs only). Next, the distribution of this basic formal distinction along the perfective-imperfective, stative-dynamic and punctual-durative dimension was examined with particu-lar attention for evidence of the operation of the Defective Tense principle.

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  Theory and Language Acquisition

  • Martin Pütz, Susanne Niemeier, Martin Pütz, Susanne Niemeier(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  We further argue that all the meaning elements as-sociated with English tense that we discuss are best understood as response concepts. Next, we turn to Grady's insights regarding expe-riential correlation. We argue that experiential correlation provides a powerful mechanism for explaining how distinct events come to be associated at the conceptual level. In Section 4, we examine the non-tense linguistic patterns associated with the domains of temporal ref-erence, intimacy, salience, actuality, and attenuation and show that all are elaborated through distal-proximal image content. In Section 5, we argue that the fact that all these concepts are elaborated by the The relation between experience, conceptual structure and meaning 71 same image content links them at the conceptual level. This concep-tual linking, then, licenses the use of tense morphology to signal these various uses. Finally, in Section 6, we sketch some of the im-plications of the analysis for language pedagogy. 2. The phenomena In order to give a sense of the various meanings of tense to be inves-tigated, we present some examples below. We also emphasize that we will only be considering the synthetic tense forms in English, namely the present and Past Tense bound morphemes. The present tense morpheme we will represent by [zero/s] or [0/s], to capture the fact that this tense morpheme constitutes the default verb marking. The Past Tense morpheme we will represent by [Id], which represents a generalization over regular and irregular Past Tense verb marking in English. These two tense morphemes can be employed to signal the following meanings: Time-reference (1) a. I work in advertizing (present time-reference) b. Yesterday I went to the cinema (past time-reference) Intimacy (2) a. A: Jane just bought a Volvo. B: Maureen has one. A: John, you've got to quit talking about Maureen as if you're still going together.

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  The Grammar of Palula

  • Henrik Liljegren(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  10 Verbal categories 10.1 Tense-aspect categories and their functions There are seven frequently occurring TMA-categories in the language. Their re- spective paradigms are exemplified with the verb til- ‘walk’ in Table 10.1, and described in further detail in §10.1.2-§10.1.4, §10.1.6-§10.1.8, and §10.2.1. A num- ber of additional verbal categories, some of them less frequent (§10.2.2-§10.2.4), others non-finite (§10.3), are also introduced in the chapter. All of these verbal categories are capitalised (Future, Simple Past, etc.) to indicate that they are lan- guage-specific labels, defined functionally and only partly correspond to the, non- capitalised, inflectional categories (future, perfective, etc.) that were introduced in §9.4, on the one hand, or to grammatical terms applied cross-linguistically (future [tense], perfective [aspect], etc.), on the other hand. Tense differentiation is in Palula, as in many other IA languages (Masica 1991: 262), secondary as compared to aspectual differentiation. Whereas aspect – or to be more precise, perfectivity – as an inflectional element occurs next to the stem, followed by agreement suffixes, tense categories are, at least historically speak- ing, latecomers, and are still not fully part of the verb in Palula. There is possibly one very visible and unexpected exception to this rule: the Present, which oc- curs with a unique TMA-marking morpheme that for various reasons should be viewed as a marker of tense rather than aspect. Insofar as tense other than that is deemed relevant, it is indicated periphrastically by auxiliaries positioned after the finite verb (§10.1.5). 10.1.1 Basic tense-aspect categories As shown in Figure 10.1, there are three non-periphrastic categories that can be considered basic: Future, Present and Simple Past.

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  Grammar and Meaning

  A Semantic Approach to English Grammar

  • Howard Jackson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4

  Specifying States, Eventsand Actions: Tense, aspectand modality

  In Chapter 1 we generalised about the kinds of things which we talk about by introducing the notion of situation types. We recognised three broad types of situation — STATE, EVENT, ACTION — with various subtypes. States, events and actions are represented in the grammar of the language by verbs. When we use a verb in a sentence there are a number of additional pieces of information which we may or must specify. For example, we have to choose whether to use a verb in the present tense or the Past Tense (see Chapter 1 ); it must appear in one or the other. In this chapter we are going to look at these specifications of states, events and actions. They have broadly to do with the setting of situations in time, and with the possibility or necessity of situations.

  Time

  Time is an essential element in probably all actions and events. We specify when something took place relative to the time of speaking or writing, and we may specify other time-related factors, such as whether an event (or action) was instantaneous or lasted over a period of time. States, too, are specified for time, though some may be considered to be ‘timeless’, e.g.

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