Tenses

11 Key excerpts on "Tenses"

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  The Expression of Time

  • Wolfgang Klein, Ping Li, Wolfgang Klein, Ping Li(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This will become clear as we now turn to the six devices in more detail. In what follows, the focus will be on the first three devices – tense, aspect, and Aktionsart. As has already been mentioned, this does not do justice to what really happens in human languages – but it mirrors our knowledge about it. 2. Tense 2.1. The canonical view 2 In its received understanding, tense is a deictic-relational category of the verb: it indicates a temporal relation between the situation described by the sentence and some deictically given time span; this time span is usually the 2 A very clear treatment, including a discussion of more recent developments, is Comrie (1985). Dahl (1985) and Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994) are very useful surveys. How time is encoded 43 moment at which the sentence is uttered – the moment of speech, the utter-ance time, or the “now”. In what follows, I shall mostly speak of “time of utterance” (abbreviated TU) for this deictic anchor. Typically, three tempo-ral relations are distinguished, and hence, it is often assumed that there are three basic Tenses: Past: The time of the situation precedes the utterance time. Present: The time of the situation is more or less simultaneous to the utter-ance time. Future: The time of the situation follows the utterance time. This idea goes back to the Greek philosophers. With some refinements, it is still found in most descriptive grammars, and also in many treatises on tense. The word tense itself comes from Latin tempus (“time”). In some languages, such as French or Italian, one and the same word is used for time and tense, and in many other languages, the terms “past, present, future” refer equally to the grammatical Tenses and to the notions of past, present, and future. This common origin easily invites the idea that one cannot properly express time without tense.

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  The Grammar of the English Tense System

  A Comprehensive Analysis

  • Susan Reed, Bert Cappelle(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Thus, in the future tense, the form ‘ will present infinitive’ is paired with the meaning ‘location after speech time’. A tense relates the temporal location of a situation to the temporal zero-point usually speech time or to some other known time which is itself related either directly or indirectly to the temporal zero-point. As we have seen in chapter 1, it is important not to confuse tense with time. Time is an extralinguistic category, i. e. it exists independently of language. (So, many million years ago time existed and we refer to it in sentences like This rock was formed many million years ago but there were not human creatures nor languages yet.) The term ‘tense’ is a linguistic concept: it has to do with the phenomenon that a language has different verb forms corresponding to the different ways in which a speaker can locate the actualization of a given situa-tion in time. More specifically, ‘tense’ refers to the role of specific verb forms in a given language to locate situations in time. 1 That is, as a grammatical category, tense consists of the combination of grammatical form and meaning. Since the only way to locate a situation in time is to take a point in time whose location is known, and then locate the situation in relation to this point, this means that any tense linguistically expresses the temporal relation between the time of actualization of a situation and some other time, which may be the temporal zero-point (which is normally the moment of speech) or some other ‘time of orientation’ (i. e. time to which another time is related by a tense 1. A more refined definition will be given in section 2.13.2, after some technical notions have been introduced. We will say there that tense is ‘the grammatical expression of the temporal location of the actualization of a predicated situation’. I. Introduction 95 see 2.2), such as the time of another situation.

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  The Handbook of English Linguistics

  • Bas Aarts, April McMahon, Lars Hinrichs, Bas Aarts, April McMahon, Lars Hinrichs(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  10 Tense in English LAURA A. MICHAELIS

  10.1 Introduction

  Humans conceive of time in terms of space, as shown by the language that we use to talk about temporal relations: we habitually speak of stretching out or compressing an activity, heading toward the future, returning to the past, and so on (Whorf 1956 ; Lakoff and Johnson 1980 ; Binnick 1991 ; Chapter 1 , Casasanto and Boroditsky 2008 ). When describing the meanings of the Tenses, linguists have relied on a specific instantiation of the space–time analogy: the TIMELINE . The timeline is a line (or, equivalently, an ordered set of points) that is unbounded at either end and segmented into three parts: the past, the present, and the future. While we can describe various ordering relations among points on the timeline (as when we describe two events as simultaneous), only one type of relation counts as a tense relation: that which includes the time at which the linguistic act is occurring. As Lyons states (1977, p. 682), “the crucial fact about tense […] is that it is a deictic category. A tensed proposition, therefore, will not merely be time‐bound, […] it will contain a reference to some point or period of time which cannot be identified except in terms of the zero‐point of the utterance.”

  Like other linguistic reference points that are anchored in the “here and now,” the temporal zero‐point can, under the appropriate conditions, be identified with times other than the time of speaking or writing. One such case is that in which a writer uses the time of message interpretation, rather than the time of message construction, as the zero‐point (Declerck 1991 , p. 15). For example, a note writer may choose the formulation I’m across the hall rather than I will be across the hall. The shifting of the temporal zero‐point also occurs in subordinate clauses, both temporal and conditional, as in, for example, When/if you have finished your test, [raise your hand]. Here, a present‐perfect predication is used despite the fact that its reference point is located in a (hypothetical) future rather than at the time of speaking (McCawley 1981

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  Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language

  • Rainer Bäuerle, Christoph Schwarze, Arnim von Stechow(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Tense in Texts Hans Kamp, London and Christian Rohrer, Stuttgart What is the meaning of a tense? There are various ways in which one might try to answer this question - and what way one will think appropriate tends to be determined by one's conception of linguistic meaning in general. Thus for instance someone who believes that a theory of meaning should analyze the truth conditions of the sentences of the language under study will see the problem as that of describing what contributions the various Tenses make to the truth conditions of the sentences in which they occur. Such has been the attitude towards the semantic analysis of tense favoured by those working within the framework of model-theoretic semantics, an approach which has been largely inspired by the conviction that a theory of meaning must be a theory of conditions of truth. In their attempts to explicate the semantic significance of the tense markers model-theoreticians have moreover tended to make the assumption, common in model-theoretic analyses of natural language, that truth conditions can be articulated in abstraction from the verbal contexts in which sentences typically occur when they are actually used. This, it seems, is the wrong way to tackle this particular problem. For the significance of the Tenses lies primarily in the temporal relations which they establish between the sentences in which they occur and the sentences which precede those in the texts or discourses in which those sentences figure. A first systematic attempt to come to grips with this aspect of temporal reference is, we believe, that of Kamp (1979).

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  Linguistic Semantics

  • William Frawley(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8  

  Tense and Time

  8.1. INTRODUCTION

  In this chapter, we inquire into how language structures and encodes time. The analysis of linguistic time has an involved history, with logical and structural/typological camps (Comrie 1985; Dahl 1985; Prior 1967; Reichenbach 1947; Rescher and Urquhart 1971). In our own foray into the matter, we try to extract the accepted findings from both practices in an attempt to present the necessary elements of any linguistic system of time.

  We restrict our study of time to the mechanism that assigns time to events: tense. This focus on tense affords us a number of advantages. Most immediately, it allows us to contrast the internal temporal contour of events with their nontemporal internal contour, aspect, discussed at length in the previous chapter.

  If aspect is the way that an event patterns within or over a time frame, tense is the way an event is explicitly indexed for a time frame, the grammatical and morphological means that a language uses to locate an event in time. Aspect encodes the nondeictic contour of events; tense signals the deictic contour insofar as such concepts as ‘location in time’ and ‘relative order’ are deictic because they require reference points for their determination. We thus get considerable use out of our previous discussion of deixis now that we are required to apply it to the structure of events and their temporal location.

  Our investigation proceeds as follows. First, we spell out the basics of time and its encoding in any language. Here, we discuss the canonical model of time that underlies linguistic expressions and the elemental deictic requirements of any tense system. Thereafter, we see how the deictic structure of tense translates into linguistic form. The deictic reference point and located point relate to how languages assign absolute and relative values. Remoteness between the reference point and the located point determine the ways that languages choose to measure temporal distance, either through simple extension, as a vectorial system, or through intervals, as a metrical system.

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics

  • Keith Allan(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  Temporal logic: from ancient ideas to artificial intelligence. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Prior A N (1957). Time and modality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior A N (1967). Past, present and future. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior A N (2003). Papers on time and tense. Hasle P, Øhrstrøm P, Bra ¨uner T & Copeland J (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Benthem J (1991). The logic of time: a model-theoretic investigation into the varieties of temporal ontology and temporal discourse (2nd edn.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Aca-demic Publishers. Vendler Z (1967). Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tense C Fabricius-Hansen , Germanistisk Institutt, Oslo, Norway ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Tense is a grammatical category that serves to locate situations in time; it is the basic grammatical category that, together with lexical and other indications of ordering in time, enables the hearer to reconstruct the temporal relation between the speech situation and the situation described in a sentence and to recon-struct the relative order of situations described in a text. It is important to distinguish among tense forms, the rather abstract grammatical meanings expressed by such forms (semantics of tense), and the actual use and interpretation of Tenses in natural discourse (pragmatics of tense). European languages have more or less elaborate tense systems, whereas many non-European lan-guages lack grammatical tense. In languages without tense, temporal ordering is expressed by nongramma-ticalized means (e.g., temporal adverbials) alone and the temporal location of the described situation is not necessarily indicated by linguistic means at all. On Tense Marking Tense is usually expressed overtly on the (finite) verb by way of morphological markers (cf. happen-s vs. happen-ed, sing vs. sang ) or specific auxiliary words ( will happen, has happened, had happened ), depend-ing on typological properties of the individual lan-guage.

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  Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar

  • Martin J. Endley(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  ( Jespersen, 1933, p. 230) Jespersen’s point is clear enough: The ideas of time and tense should not be unthinkingly conflated. While time is seemingly “common” to every- one, tense is “the linguistic expression of time relations . . . indicated in verb forms,” and it varies from one language to another. Echoes of this salutary warning can be found in the work of more recent linguists. For example, Huddleston and Pullam write as follows: We distinguish sharply between the grammatical category of tense and the semantic category of time. In It started yesterday, You said it started tomorrow, and I wish it started tomorrow, for example, started is a preterite 1 verb-form in all three sentences, but only in the first does it locate the starting in past time. (Huddleston & Pullam, 2002, p. 51) It is a relatively simple matter to demonstrate that the two concepts, time and tense, really are distinct. You are, no doubt, already familiar with the idea that a present tense verb can be used to refer to a future event, as it is in the following: 226  Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar (1) The train leaves at 8:00 tomorrow. Typically, one of the first things teachers tell their students about the present simple in English is that it can be used to refer to future events, usually when those events are scheduled or expected. What such familiar examples reveal is that there is no necessary connection between the tense of the verb and the time frame it signifies. Consider another example. The following sentence, again with the verb in a present form, could only be meaningfully uttered at a time prior to the day in question: (2) This year, Christmas Day falls on a Saturday. Similarly, a speaker might produce a sentence like (3), in which the verb is marked as present progressive, even though the event of leaving has yet to take place: (3) We’re leaving for the Philippines tomorrow.

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  Semantics - Typology, Diachrony and Processing

  • Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Brustad (2000) argues convincingly that the language is aspectual and tenseless.

  3.2 Syntax

  In tensed languages, tense is an obligatory bound morpheme that expresses temporal information. The tense morpheme is part of the grammatical ‘spine’ of a sentence. As such, tense has grammatical ramifications: it is involved in agreement, case, anaphora, and the finite/non-finite distinction. All main clauses have an obligatory tense morpheme, so that all main clauses convey temporal information. English, French, German, and Hindi are tensed languages.

  The simplest syntactic assumption for a tensed language is that the basic phrase marker includes TensePhrase as a functional category. The tense morpheme has scope over an entire clause. In some accounts, e.g. Discourse Representation Theory, it is this Structure that is then the input used to form a semantic representation. In a more syntactic approach, Stowell (1996) proposes that tense is a dyadic temporal ordering predicate. He posits a functional category ZP (for ZeitPhrase), the complement of tense; ZP is modeled on DP. The arguments of the tense head T represent times and situations. See also Giorgi & Pianesi (1997) and Demirdache & Uribe-Extebarria (2000) .

  Tenseless languages have a syntactic AspectPhrase category but no TensePhrase. These languages introduce some temporal information, but the information must be supplemented by pragmatic inference, as developed below. I do not posit syntactic Structure that corresponds to the pragmatics of temporal inference. Thus although all languages convey information that allows temporal location, they do so with different syntactic Structures and semantics.

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  Oppositions in Morphology

  As Exemplified in the English Tense System

  • Irina Khlebnikova(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  11. OPPOSITIONS IN THE CATEGORY OF TENSE Our first task will be to establish the nature of time relations in the scheme of tense-aspect, all the paradigms of which are joined into one whole. Defined as one of the principles of the functioning of the verb system, the principle of the binarity of contrasts remains the basic one in the correlation of those sets or formtypes which represent the essence of the grammatical category of tense. The prime point of all the verbal relations in the plane of time is the point of the present moment (the act of speech), since man's account of some event is a real and objective criterion of the relations existing in extra-linguistic reality, interpreted through the prism of human brains. The moment of speech is the main axis of orientation (temporal plane) of verbal actions, which gives rise to other temporal planes. Priority to this moment is expressed in the past, which is not linked with the moment of speech and creates a second axis of orientation — the axis of the past. Anticipated events posterior to the act of speech find expression in the following axis of orientation, marked by the term 'future'. But the succession of events may be considered not only as proceeding from the axis of the present, but of the past as well. Herein lies the specific nature of the interpretation of events through the prism ol man's attitude to the time of speech. Hence, there can exist (as, e.g., in English or French) another axis, that of a future action considered from the point of view of the past (FII). All these four axes are represented

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  The Expression of Temporal Meaning in Caboverdean

  • Fernanda Pratas(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  chapter 1, to complex ideas in both the philosophical and psychological sense (as conception and perception are sometimes difficult to tell apart). Klein later suggests that it “should be replaced by the more general notion of clause-external temporal structure, to which situations described by a sentence can be linked” (Klein 2009: 48).

  There is a multitude of ways to express the linkage between the lexical content and TT, and then between TT and TU, and Klein (1994) presents various examples of this complexity, for which some languages have morphological distinctions (these are typically from the Indo-European family) and others do not. And so, given that he is talking about language universals, when he defines tense in the terms pointed out above, he refers to the relation itself (Tenses are “abstract temporal relations”; Klein 1994 : 123), not to morphological verb markings. In another work he even states that tense, in the sense of verbal inflection, “is not only to be separated from time—it is not even a [sic] particularly important for the expression of time. Many languages do not have it at all, and in those languages that do have it, it is largely redundant” (Klein 2009: 43).82

  4.1.2  Tenseless languages

  Tenselessness is here taken as the lack in a given language (or clause) of dedicated grammatical markings for that relation between TT (topic time) and TU (time of utterance). This is in line with most studies on this issue, which thus defend the absence of tense morphemes without defending that a tense meaning, in the above sense, is also absent from those languages (there is at least on exception, though).83

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  Malayalam Verbs

  Functional Structure and Morphosemantics

  • Amanda Swenson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2 The Puzzle of Tense in Malayalam: A Cross-linguistic Perspective 2.1 The questions & main claims This chapter focuses on tense 1 and investigates the broad questions in (1). (1) a. What types of cross-linguistic variation exist in the domain of tense? b. How can this variation be theoretically accounted for? c. What can this variation teach the field about Universal Grammar? Beginning with the first question, one way languages can vary is with respect to the type of tense morphology they have. English has two-three Tenses, depending on if the future is classified as a tense or a modal. (2) a. Liz is dancing. [present tense] b. Liz danced. [past tense] c. Liz will dance. [future tense/modal] Other languages, such as St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish, Canada) (Matthewson 2006) and Mandarin (Sinitic, China) (Lin 2006, Lin 2010), have no tense morphol-ogy, (3)–(4). In these types of languages, while the verb may be marked with other morphology, there is no morphology that encodes the relationship between the Topic Time and the Utterance Time. (3) St’át’imcets a. táyt-kan hungry-1s g.subj ‘I was hungry/I am hungry.’ b. k’ác-an’-lhkan dry-dir-1sg.subj ‘I dried it/I am drying it.’ (Matthewson 2006 p4: 4) 1 Recall that in this book the term ‘tense’ is being used to refer to the relationship in (i). (i) Tense = Utterance/Speech Time & the Topic/Reference Time (Klein 1994) a. Utterance Time ⊆ Topic Time (Present tense) b. Topic Time < Utterance Time (Past tense) c. Utterance Time < Topic Time (Future tense) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510144-002 42 | 2 The Puzzle of Tense in Malayalam: A Cross-linguistic Perspective (4) Mandarin a. Wo I zhu live zai in Lutedan. Rotterdam ‘I live in Rotterdam.’ [ok Pres, X Past, X Fut] b.

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