English Tense System Research Articles

English fronting constructions as a window to the semantics of tense: the case of belief reports

This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of attitude reports. The framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) de se tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a de re interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant.

Tense Errors in Albanian Speakers Learning English (L2)

Albanian students learning English as a Second Language (ESL) face considerable challenges with the English tense system due to significant grammatical differences between the two languages. This study examines the specific difficulties that Albanian ESL learners in Kosovo experience with tense usage, drawing on responses from both questionnaires and written compositions. The results reveal a high frequency of errors, particularly in the Past Simple, Present Simple, Present Perfect, Past Perfect, and Future Simple tenses. The most common errors were related to incorrect tense construction. The frequent mistakes in the Past and Present Simple tenses suggest that native language interference and the overgeneralization of English rules contribute significantly to the learners' struggles. The study calls for further research, especially longitudinal and oral-based studies, to better understand these issues and to develop more effective teaching strategies to help Albanian learners improve their command of English tenses.

Teaching the English Tense System through Systemic Theoretical Instruction and Cognitive Grammar: Investigating Students’ Perceptions

Teaching the English Tense System through Systemic Theoretical Instruction and Cognitive Grammar: Investigating Students’ Perceptions

Wrong Usage of English Tenses in Student’s Essays: The Nigerian Experience

The paper examines wrong usage of English tenses in sentences contained in students’ essays. English as a language has distinct and peculiar rules governing its usage and the rules guiding the correct use of tenses is one of them. The theory adopted for this study is Error Analysis by Pit Corder and it is adopted because it has been observed over the years that learners and users of a second or foreign language, most often than not, transfer the grammatical and semantic features of their first language (mother tongue) to the language that is being learnt. During the study, it was discovered after a careful data analysis of students’ essays that English tenses are most of the time wrongly used by students. One of the recommendations given is that students should be encouraged and made to familiarize themselves with the distinctive English tense system so that they can easily identify their inadequacies in English tense usage and aim at improving on them to enhance their level of proficiency in English language usage generally.

A functional perspective on the challenges of teaching English tenses to speakers of other languages: The case of adult speakers of Serbian

Systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) describes the English TENSE system as a logical ideational resource for representing experience of time. There is a gap in research, however, exploring the applications of an SFL-based tense description in second language acquisition (SLA). Using the SFL framework, this paper investigates the difficulties arising for adult Serbian speakers when learning English tenses and offers practical pedagogical strategies. Data were collected through surveys and interviews with English teachers in Serbia. The findings indicate that learners struggle when tense forms reflect more than one temporal relation, arguably due to the Serbian tense system. The study also suggests learners’ tendencies to misinterpret English progressive tenses as equivalent to Serbian imperfective aspect. The concept of relative tenses can be used to observe all time references influencing tense selection. It can also be employed to mitigate the negative L1 transfer in terms of aspect. The key implication of this study pertains to the benefits of adopting a systemic-functional perspective on time realisation in SLA research.

Acquisition of English Tense and Aspect Translation Competence by Behdini Students: An Experimental Study

This study is an attempt to investigate the acquisition of translation competence of the English tense and aspect system by Behdini learners who are students at the Translation Department at the College of Languages in the University of Duhok. This paper is an experimental study that adopts the Translation Competence Acquisition model. There are many morphological and syntactic differences between English and Behdini tense and aspect and there are differences in terms of the usage of the tense and aspect between the two mentioned languages too. A Judgement Elicitation Task is employed as a tool to collect data in this study. 4o English sentences with their translations into Behdini are included in this task. Behdini learners are asked to make their judgements on each translated sentence. These test items are a mixture of four tenses: present continuous, present perfect, past continuous, and past perfect. Two subgroups of learners are involved in this study: the senior subgroup and the fresher subgroup in an attempt to investigate the effect of participants’ English language level and proficiency. Mixed-effects modeling has been used for analysing the data statistically. The lmer package (version is 3.3.1) has been employed with logit link function and binomial variance for the judgement data in R, which is an open-source language and environment for statistical computing. The main hypothesis of the study is that Behdini learners are not expected to attain a complete translation competence regarding the English tense and aspect system due to the differences between the two languages. The main results of the study show that while Behdini learners were able to attain a good translation competence in terms of accepting the grammatical translations, they failed to reject the ungrammatical translations. These findings implicate that Behdini learners’ acquisition of translation competence is not attained fully. It is also shown that Behdini students at lower proficiency levels employ their L1 grammar as the first stage of their translation process, but at later stages of proficiency parameter resetting becomes more possible.

An Eclectic Approach to Teaching the English Tense System to Arabic-Speaking Learners of English: A Pilot Study

The proper use of tenses is one problem facing Arabic-speaking learners of English when they are taught them and their uses. One of the reasons is the traditional method through which students were taught grammar. The aim of the study is to implement an eclectic approach for teaching the English tenses to Arabic-speaking learners of English.

Investigating the Effect of Consciousness-raising Techniques on Learning the English Tense System by EFL Students

This study explores the effect Consciousness-raising techniques (henceforth, C-R techniques) can have on the learning of the English tense system. The sample of the study (n=100) was randomly drawn from beginning EFL students at Taif University, KSA. The experimental design was used to carry out the study. The sample was divided into an experimental group (n=50) and a control group (n=50). Data for the study was collected via a test the researcher designed and administered to the two groups of the study. In addition to that, a special treatment of learning tasks and activities was given to the study's experimental group only. The data collection instrument (i.e. the test) comprised six questions relating to the form and uses of the present and past simple tenses. Data was then analysed by SPSS. The results of the study were statistically significant in favour of the experimental group (t-test value 1.072, the two-tailed level of significance .006 and p < 05).

Fake Tense in conditional sentences: a modal approach

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou (Linguist Inq 31(2):231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework (Heim and Kratzer, Semantics in generative grammar, 1998), using the restrictor approach to conditionals (Kratzer, in: R. Bauerle et al. (eds.) Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich (eds.) Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system (von Stechow, in: W. Klein (ed.) The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008).

A Tentative Study of the English Tense from a Metaphorical Perspective

The English tense system has always been one of the main subjects for linguists and grammarians. This paper adopts the metaphorical approach to study the English tense. By analyzing the prototypical uses of the present tense and the past tense, the author gives a convincing and reasonable explanation of these various uses of the English tense. The metaphorical approach used in this paper provides a new perspective for the study of the English tense. The metaphorical mapping processes of the past tense and the present tense reflect the universal cognitive mechanism of human beings, that is, learners acquire knowledge from known to unknown. The last but not least, the new interpretations of the different uses of the English tense offers a practical help for the teaching and learning of tense.

Corpus-based approach to teaching English tenses in Slovenian tertiary education

The article deals with a corpus-based approach to teaching the English tense system in a Slovenian tertiary institution. In addition to offering online support (Moodle) in Business English courses taught at the Faculty of Management, University of Primorska, Business English teachers rely on corpus-based approach in their efforts to provide learning support to students trying to master the English tense system. Corpus-based approach in teaching represents a shift towards a learner-centred paradigm of discovery learning which enables students to test their own hypotheses and discover their own rules in the process of the so-called data-driven learning. In addition, corpus examples also expose students to sentences and structures that they will encounter when using the language in real-life business situations. Hard and fast rules regarding English tenses should be substituted by corpus-based data-driven hypothesis testing learner-centred notions.

Renaat Declerck (in collaboration with Susan Reed and Bert Cappelle), The grammar of the English verb phrase, volume 1: The grammar of the English tense system: A comprehensive analysis. (Topics in English Linguistics 60-1.) Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. vii + 846.1

Renaat Declerck (in collaboration with Susan Reed and Bert Cappelle), The grammar of the English verb phrase, volume 1: The grammar of the English tense system: A comprehensive analysis. (Topics in English Linguistics 60-1.) Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. vii + 846.1 - Volume 12 Issue 3

Time Will Tell: Tense in Narration

Time Will Tell : Tense in Narration — This article examines both linguistic and narrative motivations for the use of present tense in a series of children's novels in French, concluding that the choice is dictated by temporal proximity between the time of the story and the time of the narration, and by the aspectual indeterminacy of the present tense. The choice of tense in the English translation is then discussed. Since the English tense system makes different distinctions and has different effects, various solutions are called for.

Two Conflicting Models of the English Tense System (N. Wada, Interpreting English Tenses: A Compositional Approach)

Two Conflicting Models of the English Tense System (N. Wada, Interpreting English Tenses: A Compositional Approach)

How to manipulate tenses to express a characters point of view

This study treats the crucial concept of point of view (henceforth PoV) as comprising three major but distinct sub-types -communicative PoV (the here-and-now of encoder or decoder), experiencer's point of view, or narrative point of view- but with the proviso that the first of these can in fact be subsumed under the third. The sub-types can be distinguished by close attention to their contrasting use of a variety of special mechanisms or devices that are inherent in the English tense system. Of considerable interest are projections of experiencer's PoV. Consider, for example, someone who says Yesterday she had to speak French with a client who couldn't understand English. By using past tense couldn't, that encoder has adopted the French-speaking woman's experiential viewpoint at the time when the reported situation transpired, rather than remaining confined to their own communicative PoV. The third kind of PoV, narrative PoV, generally what is meant by PoV in literary studies, has to do with the questions Who's the narrator? and Whose Exp-PoV is assumed by the narrator?.

Remarks on Salkie and Reed's (1997) ‘pragmatic hypothesis’ of tense in reported speech

Salkie &amp; Reed (1997) offer a ‘pragmatic hypothesis’ of tense in reported speech which runs counter to Jespersen's &amp; Comrie's quotative or ‘sequence of tenses’ analysis as well as to the more semantically based analysis proposed by Declerck (1990b, 1991a). In doing so they also cast doubt on the model of the English tense system which was proposed by Declerck (1991a) and has since been further refined and elaborated in a number of articles and in Declerck (1997).The present article goes into the many arguments that S&amp;R advance, refutes them, and adduces additional evidence for D's theory and against S&amp;R's ‘pragmatic hypothesis’.

Be Going To + Infinitive: Origin and Development. Some Relevant Cases from the Helsinki Corpus

As is well known, most grammarians do not seem to agree on the exact place the pattern be going to + infinitive occupies within the English tense system, nor do they coincide in the reasons for its appearance and spread, nor indeed in the various meanings attributed to the construction. This paper outlines the historical development of the be going to construction throughout the different stages into which the history of the English language has traditionally been divided, with special emphasis on the so-called early Modern English (eModE) period. For this purpose, a computerized corpus, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, has been used, in particular the HE3 section, which covers the period between 1640 and 1710.

Is there a relative past tense in English?

Abstract Traditional analyses of the past tense such as Reichenbach's (1947) and Comrie's (1985) assign a single semantic structure to the past tense and do not distinguish between absolute and relative past tenses in English. In the present article it is argued that we cannot do without the notion of a relative past tense. Ten empirically based arguments are adduced in support of this. The author also discusses six possible tests to distinguish between absolute and relative past tenses in concrete examples and points out that the analysis has some important theoretical implications. He argues that the distinction between absolute and relative tenses requires a model of the English tense system that is based on the concept of temporal domain, and that the traditional analysis of the meaning of the past tense morpheme (viz. ‘Event time anterior to speech time’) stands in need of qualification.

Expanded tenses in the old English orosius a syntactic strengthening*

The present chapter reports the investigation into certain aspects of the periphrastic construction to be +present participle (e.g. NE: "he is teaching"; OE. "he is laerende") viewed as an example of a syntactic strengthening. The construc­ tion is usually referred to as "continuous tenses/form" or "progressive tenses/form", whereas Nickel (1966) uses "expanded form". Coming closest to this latter term, the "expanded tenses" employed here seems a convenient label for two reasons: a) the use of expanded tenses is not restricted to the expression of verbal aspect (Aspekt) or mode of verbal action (Aktionsart), which is implied by the use of either the term "continuous tenses/form" or the term "progressive tenses/form"; b) the expanded tenses are integrated into the English tense system, in the sense that they can be substituted with the respective non-expanded tenses without any change in the syntax of the clause, e.g.