Tense in Swedish and English

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot contrastive investigation of tense in English and Swedish. Tense is regarded as a morphological category, and present and past tense inflections, as well as a number of auxiliary and main verb combinations, have been compared in a small sample of texts from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). A generally high degree of correspondence with some variation in the different text types was found. The most striking difference is that present tense inflections in Swedish are frequently translated into past tense inflections in English, especially in narrative texts. It was also found that Swedish tense inflections, especially present tense inflections, are frequently translated into auxiliary and main verb combinations with overtly realised modal features in English, and that English past tense inflections frequently correspond to present tense combinations with overtly realised aspectual features in the Swedish original.