Tenses

Writing plays an integral role in English students' academic life. Background study reveals that 'grammar' is one of the most significant challenges concerning students' academic writing performance. The present paper aims to find out the grammatical difficulties that university students face in their academic writing and to identify the causes of this problem. Furthermore, the study seeks to investigate the strategies and solutions to tackle this problem. Data in this research were collected from 200 students of B.A. in Education (with the sub-major in English) at the University of Nizwa in Oman. The samples were students' assignments throughout the semester. A table of frequency was formed to list the type of grammatical errors and the number of times the mistake was observed. Three grammatical points, namely, tenses, adverbs and pronouns were students' most frequent mistakes. Then an interview was conducted with the students to figure out their perception of the mistakes in their academic writing skill. Students' perception was looked into against their actual mistakes in writing. Finally, the sources of these errors were investigated in the background study and the related literature, and some pedagogical implications were made. The method of research in this study is qualitative.

Abstract: Partee (1973) famously suggested that English tenses and personal pronouns behave in analogous ways. She concluded that these behavioral analogies speak for a referential theory of tenses. A couple of decades later, Stone (1997) argued that English modals exhibit the whole range of pronoun-like behaviors observed by Partee. Partee and Stone’s lines of argument have been quite influential in modern formal semantics. Taken together, they support the view that temporal and modal operators must be dispensed with in favor of variable-based logical forms. In the present paper I propose a way of resisting this conclusion. On the view that I put forward, tenses and modals are treated as context-sensitive and sub-sentential intensional operators. I argue that my approach predicts the right truth-conditions for sentences involving the pronoun-like uses of tenses and modals in which Partee and Stone were interested.

Keywords: intensional operators, modals, pronouns, tenses

Modern Hebrew is a tense system and Biblical Hebrew was usually thought to be the same until the end of the 19th century, when tense was rejected in favor of ‘aspect’, followed by other proposals combining tense with some other parameter, whether aspect, taxis, discourse genre, or modality.

This study compared deductive and inductive approaches of teaching tenses to secondary school learners. The aim of this study was to test the efficiency of the two instructional approaches of teaching tenses by observing learners’ performance. Sixty participants (37 female and 23 male), learning English in the Kingdom of Eswatini, participated in this quasi-experimental study. Convenience sampling was used to select participants who were randomly assigned to two control groups. The independent variable was ‘teaching method,’ with two levels: deductive versus inductive. The dependent variables were participants’ achievement scores derived from the pre-test and post-test. The independent t-test and the dependent t-test were used to analyse data. The results revealed that there was no significant difference between the deductive and inductive approaches in teaching tenses,although each method was effective in isolation. Based on the findings, this study recommends an integration of the...

The chapter addresses instances of 'war gewesen' (i.e. BE-PRET + BE-PARTII) in the colloquial register of Modern High German which display the form of a pluperfect but seem to be used in an absolute-deictic function of a general past tense. Based on an empirical analysis of the relationship between 'war gewesen' and the grammaticalization of (plu)perfect constructions, it is argued with respect to the auxiliation of 'sein' (BE) that the participle 'gewesen' functions as an extension mechanism such as described analogously for double perfect forms (DPF) and denotes the EXISTENCE of a state of being.

This study compared deductive and inductive approaches of teaching tenses to secondary school learners. The aim of this study was to test the efficiency of the two instructional approaches of teaching tenses by observing learners’ performance. Sixty participants (37 female and 23 male), learning English in the Kingdom of Eswatini, participated in this quasi-experimental study. Convenience sampling was used to select participants who were randomly assigned to two control groups. The independent variable was ‘teaching method,’ with two levels: deductive versus inductive. The dependent variables were participants’ achievement scores derived from the pre-test and post-test. The independent t-test and the dependent t-test were used to analyse data. The results revealed that there was no significant difference between the deductive and inductive approaches in teaching tenses,although each method was effective in isolation. Based on the findings, this study recommends an integration of the...

Вид в русском языке, назваемый аспекстом в западных языках, является сложной грамма-тической категорией, особенно для тех, кто изучает русский язык как иностранный. Эта трудность особенно заметна в тех случаях, когда в рамках категории вида одно значение может передаваться разными языковыми формами, принадлежащими той же языковой классификации. Примером такого случая может служить значение кратности, которое может передаваться в языке как формами несовершенного вида, так и формами совер-шенного вида, являющимися взаимозаменяемыми. Понятие кратности, входящее в коли-чественную аспектуальность, проявляется в русском языке в первую очередь в различных частных видовых значениях форм совершенного (СВ) и несовершенного (НСВ) видов, выступает в качестве способов действия, или находит лексическое выражение в значе-нии самого глагола, а также с помощью наречий и обстоятельственных слов, что иногда усложняет понимание этой категории в использовании. С связи с этим, изучение язы-ковых единиц, имеющих различные видовые значения и анализ общих и частных видовых значений играют важную роль в понимании данной категории. В этом отношении, целью данной статьи является определение общих особенностей семантики кратности, прояв-ляющейся в ограниченно-кратном значении НСВ, являющемся его частным значением и в суммарном значении СВ, представляющем собой частное значение этого вида, а также выявление в рамках частных значений закономерностей взаимодействия кратности в вышеуказанных формах. Кроме того, в работе делаются попытки установить систему языковых средств выражения различных оттенков значений кратности формами НСВ и СВ. Вышеуказанные формы рассматриваются в сравнительном аспекте для того, чтобы понять различия в выражении между русским и турецким языками с точки зрения их морфологии и семантики.

This paper investigates the distribution of the Sequence of Τense phenomenon (henceforth SOT) in "oti" subordinate clauses, focusing on how aspect affects the application of it in Greek. There is no existed analysis focusing on how SOT is applied in Greek. I draw on data retrieved from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC) and I concluded that SOT is always allowed when the embedded verb is in imperfective aspect, but the application of it in perfective aspect remains an open issue. Only some states allow the simultaneous reading and thus, I assume that SOT cannot be restricted just by lexical aspect. Περίληψη Στην παρούσα εργασία, μελετάω την κατανομή της Ακολουθίας των Χρόνων (AX) στις δευτερεύουσες «ότι» προτάσεις στα Ελληνικά, δίνοντας έμφαση στο πώς η άποψη επηρεάζει την εφαρμογή της. Στη βιβλιογραφία δεν υπάρχει αντίστοιχη μελέτη στα Ελληνικά. Χρησιμοποιώντας δεδομένα από τον Εθνικό Θησαυρό Ελληνικής Γλώσσας διαπίστωσα ότι η ΑΧ επιτρέπεται πάντα όταν το ρήμα της δευτερεύουσας πρότασης είναι μη συνοπτικό. Ωστόσο, χρήζει περαιτέρω έρευνας η περίπτωση κατά την οποία το ρήμα της πρότασης είναι συνοπτικό, καθώς μερικά καταστασιακά ρήματα επιτρέπουν την εφαρμογή της ΑΧ. Αυτό μας οδηγεί στο συμπέρασμα ότι η ΑΧ δεν μπορεί να καθοριστεί μόνο από την λεξική άποψη.

This study compared deductive and inductive approaches of teaching tenses to secondary school learners. The aim of this study was to test the efficiency of the two instructional approaches of teaching tenses by observing learners' performance. Sixty participants (37 female and 23 male), learning English in the Kingdom of Eswatini, participated in this quasiexperimental study. Convenience sampling was used to select participants who were randomly assigned to two control groups. The independent variable was 'teaching method,' with two levels: deductive versus inductive. The dependent variables were participants' achievement scores derived from the pre-test and post-test. The independent t-test and the dependent t-test were used to analyse data. The results revealed that there was no significant difference between the deductive and inductive approaches in teaching tenses, although each method was effective in isolation. Based on the findings, this study recommends an integration of the two approaches in the teaching of tenses.

Because it is not much used except sometimes for written communication, this tense is susceptible to be extinct in the near future. Although it is a tense, it is not used in time clauses. It talks about the past in the future, so it is full of suppositions. It is used for dreams, plans, promises, and predictions. It is generally used when we talk about a deadline. After this quick unorganized introduction, I guess you have known what tense I am talking about ...

The present paper seeks to find an answer to the question of whether an all-embracing „great theory” of aspect is possible. First, the author describes shortly the situation in aspect research of our days and also examines the applicability of anthropological and cognitive aspects to aspect research, then he draws a comparison between the present state of aspectology and that of the theoretical physics. Refuting existing views on human language and its category, the aspect as a stable, once and for all fundamental and completely rational system which acts by rules, the paper presents arguments in favour of the existence of communication fragments (CFs) being the fundamental units of language (and aspectual) usage. The author’s claims are also supported by the latest results of cognitive psychology and brain research. At the end of the study the author points out that the theoretical results could be of use in language teaching practice as well.

By common consent, one of the most characteristic categories of the Polish verb is aspect. Th ere can be little doubt that the origin of the aspect category may lie in Proto-Slavic or much further back in the Proto-Indoeuropean language. It is a moot point whether the aspect was already a strong category in Proto-Slavic. Nonetheless, it is beyond dispute that the consequences of its emergence were far-reaching and took a relatively long time to clarify in the daughter languages. The various categories such as aspect, biaspectuality, and tense providing the main themes of the present paper were closely related and did interact, however, the essential eff ects of their interaction can only be identifi ed by scrutiny. In Old Church Slavonic, a certain degree of competition between the category of aspect and that of tense can already be observed, and this is also evident in Old Polish, in which tenses like the aorist and the imperfect were slowly falling into disuse. Th eir occurrence is quite rare even in the earliest Polish written records. In due course, the perfect tense gained ground and the pluperfect became almost completely obsolete. In Modern Polish, the latter only serves to archaize literary texts. In the further stages of development, the aspectual opposition also extended to the future tenses thereby aff ecting the entire Polish tense system. Also, in the aspect-tense system of the Modern Polish language, the tendency of the category of aspect to prevail over the category of tense together with the gradual decline in the number of biaspectual verbs, still common in the 16th century, seems to be quite clear. Most of the originally biaspectual initial verbs were later perfectivized by means of prefi xes. Th us, the simple verbal bases and their perfectivized derivatives could establish an aspectual partnership. In the case of verbs with foreign roots, the prefi x z- / s- played a pivotal role in perfectivation, while other prefi xes such as za- and po- had a less important role. The process of perfectivation in Polish was so extensive that only few biaspectual verbs remained free of the opposition of aspect as reminders of the fact that the development of this category is still an ongoing process. Th is is also shown by the more recent biaspectual verbs with borrowed roots for which it can be anticipated that they will form their perfective counterparts soon. The paper concludes that the amount of verbs with an aspectually uncertain status is likely to be a reliable indicator of the development of the aspect category for the earlier periods in the history of the Polish language. An important role in this may play the diachronic corpus-based investigation, which, though for a long time considered a stepchild of Slavic aspectual research, may still help to clarify a number of issues related to the category of aspect.