Tenses

12 Key excerpts on "Tenses"

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  Modality Mood & Aspect Mon 11

  • Mitchell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  states are seen from varying standpoints of changelessness. The grammatico-semantic representation of events and processes as indivisible and without extent is non-aspectual; at least as far as Arabic is concerned, aspect is a matter of duration, of (spatio-) temporal continuity and flow, and interruptions thereto. As such it contrasts with its locative counterpart, tense, and it is to this contrast that we shall first turn. For the time being, suffice it to say that the language especially grammaticalizes stative (in particular, perfect (participial) state), aspects progressive, and habitual (/iterative). Although other aspectual categories to which we refer are regularly discernible, it is to those just mentioned that we shall perforce devote most of our attention.

  3.2 Aspect and tense

  3.2.1 Relation to time

  The fact that both aspect and tense primarily relate verbal form to concepts of time has often led to confusion, and the scope of both categories still provides controversial issues among grammarians. It seems, however, to be generally agreed that tense is an inflectional category which locates the action or state expressed by a verb at a time relative to the moment of speaking. Time is, of course, a non-linguistic concept which is usually thought of in terms of subdivisions past, present, and future. Tense in Arabic is largely a matter of morphological paradigms of forms differentiated first and foremost for person, and the two paradigms in question are not at all congruent with divisions of clock or universal time. Of the two Tenses, the past, as illustrated by šαrαḥ “he explained” in

  1	’ilmudarris šαrαḥ iddars (il’usbuu° ilmααĐi)2 “The teacher explained the lesson (last week)”

  places the action expressed by the verb at a time prior to the moment of utterance. On the other hand, the nonpast, illustrated by the corresponding form byšrαḥ in

  2	’ilmudarris byšrαḥ iddars“The teacher explains or will explain the lesson”

  locates the action at a time best described negatively as not prior to the moment of utterance. There are indeed in Levantine usage cases of the nonpast where the tense has some past relevance, as we shall see. At all events, it should be emphasized that the nonpast does not assign the action in 2 to a time contemporaneous with the moment of speaking and it would be quite misleading to use the term “present” with its implications of contemporaneity. It is only in contexts of immediate report, for example an instructional description of an experiment taking place or a radio sports commentary, that the nonpast tense can be said to locate the action at a time contemporaneous with the time of utterance, as in 3 and 4

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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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  Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts

  A Discourse-Based Approach to English Grammar

  • Susan Strauss, Parastou Feiz, Xuehua Xiang(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 The Grammar of Time, Fact, Habit, Changeability, Permanence, Sequence, and Relevance in Discourse

  Tense and Aspect

  Figure 7.1  “When you’re trying to fall asleep, does it ever feel like your thumbs are still texting?”

  © Randy Glasbergen. Reproduced with permission of Glasbergen Cartoon Service.

  In Chapter 6 , we discussed verbs and their functions and power in discourse. In this chapter, we introduce tense and aspect as features of grammar that infuse verbs with time reference and perspectival detail about states and events that verbs express.

  Tense relates to the time of a situation or event. In English, there are three categories of grammar that establish a broad frame of basic time reference—present tense, past tense, and future—but only present tense and past tense are formed with morphological inflections (see Chapter 2 ). Future time is expressed with the modal will (see Chapter 8 ).

  Aspect works within these temporal frames of time to provide additional detail revealing perspectives and viewpoints with respect to how those events, processes, and actions unfold; what relationship they have with their time of unfolding; and what relationship they have with other events and times within discourse (Bybee, 2008; Bybee et al., 1994; Comrie, 1976, 1985; Fenn, 1987; Hirtle, 1967; Hopper, 1982; Langacker, 2008; Leech, 1971; Radden & Dirven, 2007).

  There are four grammaticalized aspects in English: simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive. These four aspects interact with the three Tenses to create 12 combinations of tense and aspect forms. That is, grammatical aspect and tense are inextricably interrelated. Later, we will discuss the 12 possible tense and aspect categories for English in more detail.

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  English Grammar

  A University Course

  • Angela Downing(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• Tense is the grammatical expression of the location of events in time. It anchors an event to the speaker’s experience of the world by relating the event time to a point of reference. The universal, unmarked reference point is the moment of speaking – speech time. In narrative, a point in past time is usually taken as the reference point.
• English has two Tenses, the present and the past, the past being the marked form, both morphologically and semantically.
• The basic meaning of the present tense is to locate a situation holding at the present moment. This may be an instantaneous event (I promise to wait), a permanent state, a fact held as true (The law of gravity is universal), or an habitual occurrence (He works in an office). Secondary meanings of the Present include reference to past and future events, ‘historic present’ (This man comes up to me . . . ) and the quotative (and she goes /she’s like ‘I don’t believe it’ ).
• The past tense primarily refers to a definite event or state that is prior to utterance time. Its secondary uses refer to a present event or state as hypothetical (If I were you ).
• English has no verbal inflection to mark a future tense. Instead, English makes use of a number of forms to refer to future events.
• Finite clauses in English can be marked for either tense or modality but not both. Verbs marked for tense are said to be ‘tensed’. Non-finite clauses are not tensed.