Present Tense Forms Research Articles

TRAINING GENERATIVE VERB USAGE BY IMITATION AND REINFORCEMENT PROCEDURES1

Three retarded children were trained, using imitation and reinforcement procedures, to produce past and present tense forms of verbs in response to verbal requests. Two types of experimental sessions were arranged: training sessions and probe sessions. During training sessions, a child was trained to produce one verb in both the past and the present tense. Then, in a probe session, the generalization of this training was tested by presenting to the child a series of untrained verbs interspersed with previously trained verbs. Responses to untrained verbs were never reinforced. Training sessions alternated with probe sessions throughout a multiple baseline design involving four classes of verb inflections as the baselines. The results showed that, as past and present tense forms of verbs within an inflectional class were trained, the children correctly produced past and present tense forms of untrained verbs within this class. When verbs from two or more classes were trained, the children correctly produced the verb tenses from each of these classes. Thus, the imitation and reinforcement procedures were effective in teaching generative use of verb inflections.

PUNCTUAL VERSUS DURATIVE AS COVERT CATEGORIES1

The inherent meaning of punctualness or durativeness found in many English verbs, can best be studied in the framework of Whorf's theory of Grammatical Categories. When co‐occurrence restrictions attributable to other features such as activity or nonactivity are set aside, it is clear that we must posit at least these two aspectual features, punctual and durative, to account for the way verbs and longer verbal expressions are used with time adverbs such as “already” and with the tense signs and auxiliaries. For example, punctual verbs in the present tense form express a future meaning after “hope” as in “I hope he says something”, whereas durative verbs refer to present time, as in “I hope he knows”. Comparable reactances are found after “wish”, “like”, and “would like”. Whether semantic or syntatic, these restrictions can be described in terms of either lexical features or covert categories, but not in a mathematically rigorous way.

The Dialect Geography of hast, hat in Swiss German

In The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor, 1961), Hans Kurath and his collaborator, Raven I. McDavid Jr., have given us the first detailed study in structural dialectology that has ever been made of a large geographical area. In the present article, offered in Kurath's honor, I shall try to make a similar contribution in miniature: a structural analysis of the vowel of a single pair of words, involving part of the short-vowel system of part of German-speaking Switzerland. Following Kurath's example, I shall examine the vowel phonically, phonemically, and historically. The vowel which I have chosen for analysis is that of the present-tense verb forms (du) hast, (er) hat. It is an interesting topic for a study in structural dialectology because it shows how misleading a simple phonic presentation can be if it is not accompanied by phonemic and historical presentations as well. The data are taken from the field records of the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, in Zurich; they were made available to me through the kindness of Rudolf Hotzenkocherle, the director and editor of the Atlas.l In gathering the Atlas materials, the field workers did their recording impressionistically, using a highly flexible phonetic alphabet to note every shade of sound they were able to distinguish. Of interest to us here is the treatment of the front unrounded vowels. The symbol e was used for a mean-mid vowel, and diacritics were added for closer and opener values: a single subscript dot for close e, a double subscript dot for over-close e, a single subscript hook for open e, and a double subscript hook for over-open e (much like English a in bat). Intermediate values were indicated by parenthesizing the diacritics; a vowel even opener than over-open e was written with the ligature a?. If all of these phonic data for the words hast, hat were reproduced in map form, the resulting picture would be so detailed as to defeat the very purpose of cartographic presentation. In making Map 1, I have therefore combined some of these values, as follows: (1) plain and parenthesized close e are symbolized by a vertical line (no examples of over-close e were found in the data for hast, hat); (2) mean-mid e and plain and parenthesized open e are symbolized by a diagonal line; (3) x and plain and parenthesized over-open e are symbolized by a horizontal line. Using IPA symbols, I have written these three values as [e], [e], and [ae] respectively. A few remarks need to be made about the base map, which is taken from that of the Atlas. The area covered includes 425 of the 573 points in the Atlas,2

Old Irish -icc, -ucci

Old Irish -ice 'reach, attain',' which does not exist as a simple verb in any Celtic language, has usually been connected with Skt. a'noti 'reaches'; more particularly it should be comparable to the augmentless form of the aorist. The chief reason for upholding this theory is the close affinity between the perfect forms of this verb in Celtic and Sanskrit: OIr. -dnicc and Skr. anaimba. The vowel in the present-tense form in Old Irish has caused some difficulty and has been variously explained (see VG 752, Anm. 3; Pokorny, Altir. Gramm. 48, and IF 35.339). The only possible explanation seems to be that we have here a case of shortening in unstressed position. The expected stressed forms would be: 3d sg. *-&icc, 3d pl. *4-ccat, which became, as stress was lost in context, -ice and -eccat respectively. In the same way one finds OIr. ldcimm 'I leave, let' appearing as leigim and ligim (seldom tIigim) in the modem Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) dialects.2 The influence of numerous compounds (ni-aricc 'does not find' etc.) must also be taken into consideration in order to explain the final victory of the forms with a short vowel. The original Celtic form corresponding to OIr. -ice may therefore have been (3d sg. pres. ind.) *anket, which in Goidelic changes its a into e (and i) before the nasal consonant cluster. In Welsh a corresponding stem is found in rhangu (earlier rhanghu, now rhyngu, see below), which is chiefly found in the phrase rhangu (rhyngu) bodd 'satisfy, please', lit. 'reach (someone's) pleasure' (cf. OIr. rice a less 'needs', lit. 'attains the advantage of it'), e.g. ? malphei edrfch a ranghei uod idaw Y weith 'as it were to see if his work would satisfy him' (see Strachan's Glossary s.v. rengi, in Introduction to Early Welsh). The 3d sg. pres. ind. is reinc in Middle Welsh