Perfect Tense Research Articles

Aristotle's ΚΙΝΗΣΙΣ-ΕΝΕΡΓΕΙΑ Distinction and the Ends of Human Action

A key passage in the development of Aristotle’s argument in book Θ of the Metaphysics is the distinction between the concepts of κίνησις and ἐνέργεια (1048b18-35). The distinction is made initially on the basis of particular grammatical features of verbs denoting human actions/states: some verbs in the present tense necessarily imply the contemporaneous achievement of the same verb in the Greek perfect tense (e.g. If x is seeing y, then it is the case that, at the same time, x is in a state of having seen y), whereas other verbs in the present tense are necessarily followed by (i.e. do not occur simultaneously with) the same verb in the Greek perfect tense (e.g. If x is building y, then it is not the case that, at the same time, x is in the state of having built y). Aristotle concludes that the former type of verbs (ἐνέργεια-actions) are actions which contain their proximate (i.e. most immediate) end, whereas the latter type (κίνησις-actions) are actions whose proximate ends are separate, the attainment of which yields the termination of the action. The argument in the passage, therefore, circulates around the place of proximate ends within action. This paper applies the key features of the κίνησις-ἐνέργεια distinction to Aristotle’s discussion of the δύναμις-ἐνέργεια analogy (1048a35-b9), and argues that, if Aristotle’s κίνησις-ἐνέργεια distinction is to be taken seriously, the analogy must be thought of primarily in terms of teleology. This result is finally applied to the problem of unattainable ultimate (i.e. remote) ends, or ends which human actions strive for but never reach. The problem (unsurprisingly) finds its solution in Aristotle’s natural theology presented in book Λ.

K osnovnim mehanizmom glagolsko-imenskega pregibanja v italijanščini in slovenščini

Italijanščina in slovenščina kažeta nekatere podobnosti, ki lahko izhajajo iz več ko tisočletne soseščine. Značilno oblikovno podobnost predstavlja že oblikovanje polpreteklika z glagolsko-imen-skim pregibanjem, ki predstavlja stičišče različnosti italijanskega in slovenskega videnja časoprostora: v jedru italijanskega videnja je sprega kot pregibanje v času, v jedru slovenskega videnja je sklanja kot pregibanje v prostoru.

“To mamy wpajane od dziecka” – a recipient passive in Polish?

The Polish construction mieć ‘have’ + passive participle has recently been discussed as a possible new perfect tense in the process of grammaticalization, but good arguments against this interpretation have been put forward: Semantically it is merely a resultative construction, and diachronically it has been attested with the same semantics since the beginning of literacy. However, a certain group of sentences with mieć + passive participle has not been paid sufficient attention so far. In these sentences the participle can be formed from an imperfective verb, it can be combined with a temporal adverbial referring to the time of the event and the subject is never the agent but the beneficiary. These constructions have to be classified as a recipient passive. In parallel with the Polish direct passive, there are three recipient-passive constructions (imperfective, perfective, resultative). Together with the resultative active, the constructions with mieć + passive participle fill a gap in the Polish voice system.

The use of was in Afrikaans passive constructions: a diachronic corpus study

:Afrikaans passive constructions have received significant attention in the literature for almost a century. The matter of using was instead of is in past tense passives is regularly attended to, and usually condemned in certain contexts of use. This article explores three related topics regarding Afrikaans passives with the use of a corpus of Afrikaans from 1911–2010. (1) The topic of usage patterns of Afrikaans passives in general and was passives more specifically is explored by showing, among other things, a stable ratio between past and present tense verb forms and stable agentivity, as well as showing that was passives are fairly infrequent in the data and decreasing slightly. (2) The next matter concerns details of was passive use, and three different tense distinctions are found in the data: simple past tense, past perfect tense, and, somewhat unexpectedly, dissociated past tense. Some unexpected increases and decreases in usage are reported. (3) The possibility of English influence causing the ‘incorrect’ uses of was in the passive as proposed by grammars are investigated; drawing on theory on contact-induced change and the corpus data, it is proposed that Afrikaans past tense copula constructions are more likely responsible for simple past tense was passives.

Middle-passive voice in Albanian and Greek

In this paper we consider middle-passive voice in Greek and Albanian, which shows a many-to-many mapping between LF and PF. Different morphosyntactic shapes (conditioned by tense or aspect) are compatible with the same set of interpretations, which include the passive, the reflexive, the anticausative, and the impersonal (in Albanian only). Conversely, each of these interpretations can be encoded by any of the available morphosyntactic structures. Specialized person inflections (in Greek and Albanian), the clitic$u$(Albanian) and the affix -th- (Greek) lexicalize the internal argument (or the sole argument of intransitive in Albanian) either as a variable, which is LF-interpreted as bound by the EPP position (passives, anticausatives, reflexives) or as generically closed (impersonals, in Albanian only). The ambiguity between passives, anticausatives and reflexives depends on the interpretation assigned to the external argument (generic closure, suppression or unification with the internal argument respectively). In perfect tenses, auxiliaryjam‘be’ in Albanian derives the expression of middle-passive voice due to its selectional requirement for a participle with an open position. Crucially, no hidden features/abstract heads encoding interpretation are postulated, nor any Distributed Morphology-style realizational component.

Evidentiality and the expression of speaker’s stance in Romance languages and German

In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use ( sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality – often context bound – by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.

The Impact of Teaching English Past Tenses through Literature in Sudanese EFL Classrooms on the Promotion of Students’ Performance

This study attempts to examine the effect of using English literary texts in teaching the past simple and past perfect tenses of English as a foreign language (EFL) at the secondary schools' level, in Gadarif province, in Eastern Sudan. Teaching English through literary text was done adjacent to a school syllabus called Sudan Practical Integrated National English (SPINE) for comparison purposes. On the basis of an experimental approach, pre tests and post tests were taken by 85 students; 42 students were chosen for the experimental group and 43 for the control group. The purpose behind the pre-tests was to give information about the learners' knowledge of English grammar before any training took place. After the pre tests, the two groups attended language classes through two different methods (SPINE and Literature). The language classes continued for five weeks after which students in the two groups have taken post tests. Results obtained via the tests, revealed that the teaching of English past tenses through literature proved to be more effective than through SPINE. The experimental group has relatively higher scores in comparison to the control group. The computation of the coefficient correlation showed a significant difference.

Learning Simple Perfect Tenses Using Implicit and Explicit Recasts

Numerous studies have been focused on corrective feedback (CF), specifically recasts. These studies have identified, classified, and explained their acquisitional effects. In terms of acquisitional effects, however, it seems that the studies have not yet covered all areas of grammar which constitutes a very broad range of issues. This study was an attempt to address this problem to some extent by investigating the effects of implicit and explicit recasts on the acquisition of simple perfect tenses (simple present, past, and future perfect tenses). In a within-between pretest-posttest group design, 45 Iranian students of English as a foreign language were assigned to two experimental and one control groups and underwent a treatment which lasted for 15 sessions. The students then were tested on their ability in correct application of simple perfect tenses. Following that, the collected data were subjected to different statistical tests, including MANOVA. The final results affirmed the effectiveness of recasts in improving the acquisition of simple perfect tenses. Of the two types of recasts—explicit vs. implicit—used in the study, explicit recasts proved to be more effective. Among the three tenses studied simple present perfect and simple future perfect tenses seemed to be more significantly affected.

Transfigurauit in se: sacramentalidad de la doctrina agustiniana del totus Christus

This article argues that Augustine’s choice of verb tense for the phrase transfigurauit in se offers a sacramental dimension to his doctrine of the totus Christus, the whole Christ with Christ as Head and the Church as Body. While the apostle Paul chooses the future tense, transfigurauit (Phil. 3: 21), to locate the transformation of the Church in eternity, Augustine shifts the verb tense to the perfect, thus stretching the eschatological transformation back into the historical event of the Incarnation. Augustine’s writings emphasize, however, that the transformation culminates in eternity, thus giving rise to the question of why he chooses the perfect tense. This article asserts that the grammatical shift is a theological move that reveals the sacramental dimension of the totus Christus. It considers Augustine’s use of the word transitus to describe Christ’s passage through life on earth in the Incarnation. As the Body of Christ, the Church extends Christ’s passage through earthly life, thus the transitus that was completed with the resurrection and ascension of Christ actually continues to take place in the present. And neither the transitus nor the transformation it brings will be completed until the Church foliows Christ in his ascension into heaven. Thus, the union of the totus Christus is a sacramental reality that transcends time, bringing eternal realities into the present because of past actions. The article concludes that Augustine intentionally manipulares the verb tense in order to express the sacramental dimension of the unión of Christ and the Church as each generation of Christians is transformed anew by Christ in his transitus.

A Corpus-Based Study on Original English Abstracts and Translated English Abstracts: A Case Study of Passive Voice and Pronouns

On the basis of a large amount of corpus-based studies on translation works, the translation universals hypothesis is proposed. As it claims, translations enjoy some general features and Baker (1993) summarizes them into three universals, namely simplification, explicitation, and normalization, which are supported by many following researches. However, some of the later studies contradict with these rules in several ways, and the usages of passive voice and pronouns are the two most controversial issues. Previous researches suggest that according to the universal features of explicitation and normalization, translated texts tend to have a lower frequency of pronouns while over-representing the passive voice. To examine such claimings, 160 original English abstracts from two leading journals in the field of translation studies, The Translator and Translation Studies, and another 160 English abstracts from Chinese Translator Journal and Chinese Science & Technology Translators Journal, which are translated from Chinese abstracts, are collected. Two corpora are then constructed, namely the Original English Abstracts Corpus (OEAC) and Translated English Abstracts Corpus (TEAC). The CLAWS Part-of-speech Tagger is used to tag the lexical items and word processing tool AntConc 3.2.4 is used for retrieving the words. The comparison between the two corpora suggests that the translated English abstracts contain a lower level of frequency in the use of both passive voice and pronouns, which partially query the hypothesis of explicitation and normalization. A detailed analysis shows a higher frequency of past-tense passives in the OEAC and more passives in perfect tense in the TEAC. The OEAC also contains more relative pronouns while the other contains more indefinite pronouns. The norm theory is utilized to account for such phenomena. The detailed results of the study are expected to shed some lights on professional translating and academic writing.

Auxiliary choice with Dutch verbs of directed motion

Dutch perfect tenses are constructed with the auxiliaries zijn ‘be’ and hebben ‘have’. Over the years, several semantic generalizations have been proposed to account for this auxiliary choice. This paper evaluates these generalizations on the basis of examples with verbs of directed motion (draaien ‘turn’, keren ‘turn’, and stijgen ‘ascend, rise’), collected from the Internet. The paper concludes that these data are problematic for analyses of auxiliary choice in terms of telicity and ‘Inferable Eventual Position or State’, yet provide support for analyses of auxiliary choice that rely on the notion of ‘construal’ of the motion event. In particular, the paper argues that zijn is used when the event is construed as a ‘change of state’, while hebben is used when it is construed as a ‘type of act’.

Cult Centralization in the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origins of Deuteronomy

Scholars have long understood the cult centralization formula of Deuteronomy (Deut. 12:5, etc.) to limit worship to Jerusalem, “the place which God will choose for his name to dwell.” The common theory posits that though the formula, and the book in which it was contained, was written long after Jerusalem had become the primary cultic site in Judah, it was framed with an imperfect tense verb in order to keep up the pretense of Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. However, the Samaritan Pentateuch has a perfect tense verb in this same formula in all twenty-one occurrences in Deuteronomy. Whereas scholars have typically seen this to be a strictly sectarian reading pointing to God’s prior choice of Gerizim as the holy site of the Samaritans, Adrian Schenker has recently argued persuasively for the priority of the Samaritan reading and that themt’s imperfect tense is, in fact, the sectarian alteration. This new way of understanding Deuteronomy’s centralization formula has ramifications for the origins of the book and its reception in Judah. This paper explores these issues, suggesting that the best way of understanding the authority that Deuteronomy gained in Judah is to combine Schenker’s argument about the centralization formula with E. Ulrich’s reconstruction of the text of Deut 27:4. This results in an original text of Deuteronomy that asserts that God had chosen the place for his name already at the time of Moses but did not yet identify the location. In turn, the argument presented here helps to explain the reception Deuteronomy enjoyed among both Judeans and Samaritans.

Common Errors in English Written by the Academic Journal Contributors

In linguistics, common errors in writing, especially by the non-nativespeakers of English, are beneficial for analysis. Common errors written by theacademic journal contributors especially by the Indonesian authors are typical.Since English in Indonesia is a foreign language, the articles submitted to thejournal may have errors. When editing these articles, some common errors arefound. This research attempted to investigate common errors in English writtenby the academic journal contributors from Indonesia. It is a descriptive researchusing Error Analysis (EA) and Contrastive Analysis (CA) theories. The data weretaken from 15 articles submitted by the Indonesia contributors of the accreditedacademic journals Ventura published by STIE Perbanas Surabaya. First, they wereanalyzed before they were edited and then classified according to the types oferrors. From this, common errors were identified. After this, they were describedbased on the morphological and sentence levels. Finally, possible treatment can be asserted. The results show that there are six types of common errors such as morphological levels: a) Head-Modifier, b) Agreement, c) To-Infinitive andsentence level: Dangling, Agreement, Passive Construction, and Perfect Tense. Itcan be generalized that most of the common errors are due to L1 system so thatCA for L1 with L2 is required.Keywords: Linguistics, Error Analysis (EA), Constrastic Analysis (CA), L1, and L2, Indonesia

The perfect tenses in Spanish (XIV, XV and XVI centuries)

The present manuscript is a presentation about the perfect tenses of the Spanish language during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries and it aims to characterize the last period of the linguistic change that took place in the auxiliary verb of these tenses, namely, the displacement of the verb ser (‘to be’) as haber (‘to have’) gradually expanded and became the only auxiliary verb of the perfect tenses in Spanish.BR The data are based on the following sources: The chronicle of Pedro I (14<SUP>th</SUP> century), La Celestina (15<SUP>th</SUP> century), avariety of legal documents from the 15th century and Linguistic documents from the New Spain (16<SUP>th</SUP> century). The objectives of the presentation are the following: first, to make a review of what the different linguists have written about this linguistic change; we will see that there are syntactic and semantic proposals that characterize the participles used with one or another auxiliary. Second, to show a diachronic description of the last part of the coexistence ser / haber; here we will see how in these three centuries there was an acceleration of this process: ser was still very active as auxiliary verb during the XIV century and it almost disappear by the XVI century. Third, to analyze syntactically and semantically those verbs that took both auxiliaries, that is, those that maintained longer the auxiliary ser in order to characterize this linguistic change. As we will see, most of the verbs with the semantic property of location change and those which have exclusively the intransitive property were those that were accompanied by the auxiliary verb ser longer.

Gramatičke kategorije vremena i vida kao izrazi modalnosti u engleskom jeziku

The study of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect has shown that modal meaning is frequently involved in the semantics of these categories. Taking the findings of contemporary studies into consideration, it cannot be said that the traditional explanation of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect holds true. When analysing tense and aspect, modal meaning should be included as one of the starting points. This paper primarily examines the ways in which modality is expressed through the grammatical categories of tense and aspect. The first part of the paper deals with analysing the connection between modality and the future, present, past, and present perfect tense. The second part of the paper is focused on analysing the examples that show in which way modality is connected to the grammatical category of aspect. Traditional notions of tense and aspect are challenged and it is shown how modal meaning contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of these categories.

O multifuncional pretérito perfeito composto espanhol em materiais didáticos

Variation and change in the composite form of the past perfect indicative in Romance languages has been a recurrent theme in linguistic studies and has been examined through different theoretical and methodological perspectives. For instance, departing from a panchronic approach, in the light of a functionalist perspective to grammaticalization, studies have suggested the multifunctionality of the Spanish composite past perfect tense (CPF) in synchronic samples by claiming that the semantic slips occur due to the trajectory change of this verbal form observed in diachrony. The present study analyzes the Spanish CPF, more specifically, the way this object is approached by grammar books and didactic books used with Brazilian students of Spanish as a foreign language (S/FL). Based on the perspective of functional change, this study aims at bringing to the field of S/FL teaching the theoretical debates related to the analyzed linguistic phenomenon – the CPF. The analysis of the selected materials points to a certain didactic simplification when opposing the form “he estudiado” – composite past perfect – to “estudié” – simple past perfect, illustrating a monosemic look at the complex CPF. The dialogue between grammaticalization and teaching is considered relevant, in the sense of dimensioning the contribution of research about change and variation to the classroom context; in this case, particularly, to the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.Keywords: grammaticalization, teaching, Spanish as a foreign language.

The Participle of Latin and Albanian (A Comparative Outlook)

This article points out the characteristics of the Latin participle in comparison with the Albanian participle, a comparison which is viewed from a morphological and syntactic perspective. In both languages the participle has a double nature, that of an adjective and of a verb. Unlike Albanian, the Latin participle has two voices: the active and the passive. The active voice has two tenses: the present and the future, whereas the passive has only the perfect tense. The participle is the only non-finite form, which is formed in a syntactic way in both languages, with the relevant suffixes. Albanian has only one participle, which appears in different forms, expresses a completed action and usually has a passive meaning. With the help of the front connective article it becomes an adjective and, as such, it takes the grammatical categories of gender, number and case, following the same pattern as the Latin participle. The Latin participle is often used to show secondary circumstances during which or because of which the action in the main clause occurs. In this case, the participle replaces a subordinate clause that can express time, condition, cause, purpose, or manner. In Albanian these functions are expressed by the finite forms of the verb, which are part of the subordinate clauses of time, cause, etc. When it comes to the syntactic functions of the Albanian participle, we can say that it is used as: an attribute of a noun, separate attribute of the subject or another part of the sentence, predicative complement of the subject and the object. Though seldom, the participle has also temporal and causal functions. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n8p637

A Study of Errors in Learning English Grammatical Structures on Tenses of MatthayomSuksa 4 Students of the Demonstration School, KhonKaen University

The purpose of this research were to study grammatical errors in learning English structures on Tenses of the MatthayomSuksa four students. The research group consisted of 31Matthayom Suksa four student of the Demonstration School of KhonKaen University (Suksasart) in the second semester of the 2012 academic year. The data were collected by using three kinds of instruments, namely; a multiple choices test examining grammatical errors, a table recording each student's errors, and a survey interviewing those whose errors were found. The student's errors were subsequently analyzed to find the percentage. The results were presented in the from of a table with the description. The results showed the student's errors in learning English grammars on Tenses. There errors were found in respective twenty two grammar rules in seven tenses as follow: They were past perfect tense (87.1%), past simple tense (74.2%), present perfect tense (67.4%), past continuous tense (54.8%), present simple (48.4%), future simple tense (41.7%) and present continuous tense (32.3%).

Nasalization of the Initial Consonant (d-) of the Present Perfect Tense Marker (-dẹ) After the Main Verb in Ịzọn: A Case Study of the Tarakiri Dialect

Nasalization of the Initial Consonant (d-) of the Present Perfect Tense Marker (-dẹ) After the Main Verb in Ịzọn: A Case Study of the Tarakiri Dialect

定语从句中“过&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;”与シタコトガアル的对应情况考察——基于对中日对译语料库数据的统计

定语从句中“过&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;”与シタコトガアル的对应情况考察——基于对中日对译语料库数据的统计