Tense Shift Research Articles

Detecting and Correcting Unmotivated Tense Shifts by EFL English-major Jordanian Undergraduates

A multi-dimensional process, writing demands that the writer coordinate several dimensions at a time, including grammar. Particularly in dealing with tenses, a good number of English-major EFL learners find it challenging to maintain a consistent tense during a writing task. They are usually unaware of the fact that tense shifts are necessary in some contexts but unnecessary in others. Students need to know that when they cast an essay in one tense, they need to remain consistent throughout. The researchers developed and administrated a grammatical error detection and correction test to 270 Jordanian English-major undergraduates with the aim of assessing their ability to detect and correct unmotivated tense shifts. Descriptive (percentage, mean, and standard deviation) and inferential statistics ( t test and One-Way ANOVA) were used for data analysis using SPSS 20. The results revealed that the easiest tense type to identify was the simple past while the most difficult was the simple present. As for correction, the easiest was the simple past whereas the most difficult was the present perfect. The results also showed significant differences associated with students' GPA, academic level and perceived grammatical knowledge.

Veiled Movements in "The Vale of Esthwaite"

The Vale of (1787), Wordsworth's first sustained effort at original composition, was first published in 1940 by Ernest De Selincourt in Poetical Works of Wordsworth as an example of juvenilia. Among scholars who treated De Selincourl version of poem, Geoffrey Martman's account in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 is fullest, which argues that The Yale of turns upon mind of a poet enthralled by nature despite signs that his imagination may well be independent of nature (76-89). Other treatments of De Selincourl's edition appeared in F. W. Bateson, Paul Sheats, Thomas Weiskel, James Ave rill. Jonathan Wordsworth, Kenneth R.Johnston. and Kurt Fosso. The latest edition appeared in Earlier Poems and Fragments, 1785-1797 (Cornell, 1998), edited byjared Curtis and Carol Landon, and described by Duncan Wn as the most accurate and carefully edited text of poem that we are ever likely to have (3). One can learn much about Wordsworth's evolving practice from this text, experimenting as he does with description, moral encomia, and personal reflection/retrospection inspired by Virgil's Georgics and contemporary Gothic and local color. Incomplete and underdeveloped as poem is, it parleys an initiation whereby young poet recognizes his poetic calling, as Jonathan Wordsworth first surmised in Two Dark Interpreters: Wordsworth and De Quincey (224). Comprised of three major sections or movements in manuscript, poem could be read as an anthology of visual and visionary scenes, as Landon and Curtis remarked, but there is a certain cleverness about it that makes it more than discrete imitative exercises. The argument, to adapt a Romantic convention, may be sketched hvpolhelically as follows: of Esthwaite--Superstition--Spirits, as Might Be Heard by a Minstrel--Mystic Twilight--Veil of Night--Melancholy--Power of Fancy--Storm Visions--Spectral Visitations--Remembrance of Grief following Death of Author's Father--Whispering Voice--I lope for Peace at Close of Life--Faith in Friendship --Consolation in Nature and Memory--Homage to Native Region--Filial Love--Homage to a Friend. These headings could be faithful to poem as it exists in manuscript and as young Wordsworth might formulated them for An Evening Wath and Descriptive Sketches (both 1793). For all of lapses or shifts in theme, tense, and tone, particularly in third movement, a line runs through first two movements, one that turns upon young poet's place in literary tradition, which in turn impacts final movement. Wordsworth cleverly and self-consciously acknowledges over course of poem literary tradition that precedes him, and gestures toward origins of his own poetic calling with an opening verse paragraph that I call a View of Esthwaite (1-24) that foregrounds georgic inquisitiveness inflecting first section by describing some of the larulskip's varied treasure (2). The narrator finds himself in gloomy glades of Superstition (25 ff.), where the ringing of druid Sons (31-32), moves him to ask Why roull on me your glaring eyes/Why fix on me for sacrifice (33-34, echoing Wordsworth's Irregular Fragment). The question imparts a sense of foreboding, trading as passage does in English druidic folklore. Then musing onward would I stray/Till every rude sound died away, speaker observes to lead off verse paragraphs that I tagged Spirits, as Might Be Heard by a Minstrel (43 IT.), which exhibit further awareness of other English folklore along with a knowledge of Virgilian and contemporary poetics: And oft as ceased owl his song That screamed roofless walls among Spirits yelling from their pains And lashes loud and clanking chains Were heard by minstrel led astray Cold wading thro' swampy way Who as he flies mingled moan Deep sighs his harp with hollow groan He starts dismal sound to hear Nor dares revert his eye for fear Again his harp with thrilling chill Shrieks at his shoulder sharp and shrill Aghast he views. …

A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of Past Tense Auxiliary ‘Be’ in Argumentative Essays of Malaysian ESL Learners

This research is a corpus-based study of secondary and college ESL Malaysian learner’s written work by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Past Tense Auxiliary ‘Be’. This This research studied the past tense auxiliary ‘be’, types of past tense auxiliary ‘be’ errors and frequency of past tense auxiliary ‘be’ errors found in the Malaysian Corpus of Students’ Argumentative Writing (MCSAW) corpus using the WordSmith Tools Version 4.0 and using the Error Analysis (EA) approach. The findings revealed that there are seven types of errors. They are Tense Shift, Agreement, Missing Auxiliary Be, Wrong Verb Form, Addition and Misformation and Misordering. This study can be used as a guide for English Language teachers to identify the most common errors in using the Past Tense Auxiliary ‘Be’ made by the ESL learners and decide what remedial action can be taken to prevent them from making these errors. It can also help teachers improvise and develop materials which are not only more suitable but also cater to the needs of the students. In addition to the materials, teachers can also revise their teaching approaches and strategies to ensure effective teaching and learning of these grammar components.

Teaching Grammar: The Use Of The English Auxiliary “BE” Present Tense Verb Among Malaysian Form 4 And Form5 Students

This research paper aims to explore the usage of the English Auxiliary “Be” Present Tense Verb, using corpus based method among Malaysian form 4 and form 5 students. This study is conducted by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Auxiliary “Be” Present Tense verb in students’ compositions from the MCSAW corpus developed by (Mukundan&RezvaniKalajahi, 2013). 273 Form 5 sample essays and 295 Form 4 sample essays were taken from four different national schools where the schools were from four different states. The errors made in the written usage of the English Auxiliary “Be” Present Tense verb were evaluated and analyzed using the Wordsmith software version 4. The findings revealed that there are three types of errors which are the “Tense shift, Agreement and Misuse”. The results show that there were more errors made by the form 4s compared to the form 5s even though the difference of the frequencies of errors produced by both the levels were not of much difference. Therefore, the findings of this study can be used as a guide in enabling secondary school teachers to revise and be more prepared in their teaching instructions, materials and procedures. It will help teachers look into the possible remedial actions which could be taken into consideration to overcome the problems faced by Malaysian secondary school students in using the Auxiliary “Be” Present Tense verb.

Conversational recipe telling

Conversational recipe tellings are multi-unit turns with characteristic openings and closings. They are similar to narratives in several ways, but they are also like sets of instructions, and they tend to switch back and forth between the first person past tense of the former and the second person imperative of the latter at sequentially significant junctures. Recipe tellings routinely issue from narratives and segue into narratives in conversational interaction, requiring tellers to mark off the recipe portion in characteristic ways, including shifts in tense and person. In line with their status as sets of instructions for preparing food, recipe tellings constitute expert talk, presupposing shared background knowledge and interest, and containing technical vocabulary and references to ingredients, measurements, tools and procedures associated with specialized practices. Conversational recipe telling exploits conventions from written recipes: conversational recipe telling borrows its overall sequential order, presuppositions, vocabulary, measurements, and grammatical structures from written recipe texts. Recipe telling as shop talk among cognoscenti establishes individual identity and group membership, demonstrating shared practices and interests.

TENSE SHIFT AND RHETORICAL FUNCTION IN THE ABSTRACT SECTION OF SCIENCE JOURNAL BY NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS

Abstract is an important part of scientific work for both seminar presentation and journal publication in national or international level. Every writer is obliged to write an abstract for his/her publication. The aim of this study was to examine a number of abstracts in English scientific papers by non-native speakers (Indonesian lecturers). The study was focused on the linguistic and organizational features (i.e. tense shift and rhetorical function). The research results show that a number of abstracts in the data do not conform to the principles of abstract writing, that is some abstracts do not contain complete moves. In addition, the rhetorical shift is not always followed by the tense shift.  Key words: abstract, tense shift, rhetorical function, move analysis

Parents, their Children, and the State: Intimate Perspectives on Reconciliation in Porcupines and China Dolls

Since the knowledge of abuses in residential schools became more widespread, Aboriginal groups have campaigned for redress regarding the wrongs they endured in the schools at the hands of the Canadian state and the church organizations that ran them. These schools, often failing to educate students due to their meagre resources, became sites of abuse, neglect, and disease aimed at assimilating Aboriginal children (Brant Castellano 255). Forbidden from speaking their languages, children suffered numerous injuries, including kidnapping, sexual abuse, beatings, confinement, and forced labour, to name only a few (256-57). Despite knowing of these abuses, federal bureaucrats justified the schools on the grounds that children can learn and absorb nothing from their ignorant parents but barbarism (Milroy quoted in Brant Castellano 255). D.C. Scott, perhaps one of the bureaucrats most closely linked to residential schools, refused to waver from his department's policy of assimilation even after learning of high death rates. Describing his policy in words that are likely shocking to a modern reader, Scott insisted the schools were geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem (Scott quoted in Brant Castellano 255). The schools, widely implemented after the 1920s through the Indian Act, forcibly removed children from their homes, families, and communities. Indeed, the oft-cited goal was to kill the Indian in the child (Brant Castellano 250). In recent years, campaigns aimed at state recognition of these abuses as well as restitution can be said to have been successful in many ways. In 2006 a settlement agreement was reached to provide $1.9 billion in financial compensation to survivors of residential schools. The agreement also created the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The first of its kind initiated in a Western democracy, the commission works to acknowledge abuse, bear witness to survivors' testimonies, and promote awareness. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement came into effect in 2007, providing financial compensation to former students beginning at $10,000, with the possibility of substantially more for survivors of sexual or physical abuse. A parallel Aboriginal Healing Foundation was created at the same time, although it lost its funding in March of 2010. While Aboriginal groups continue to make claims against the Canadian state regarding issues of sovereignty, Indian status, renaming, and land claims, redress movements framed around residential schools and sexual abuse have been the most successful and, arguably, are the most dominant in mainstream Canadian media (Henderson 6). (1) At the same time, redress discourse has been criticized for forcing claimants to articulate their victimization through Western conceptions of healing, trauma, and imprisonment. While these redress tropes are limited in how they can communicate historical wrongs, fiction writing can expand on limited conceptions of colonialism by exploring its intended intergenerational effects. As a specific example, I will demonstrate how Robert Arthur Alexie's 2002 novel Porcupines and China Dolls thematizes the effects of the state's assimilationist policies on the family by altering the very language used to name kin, emphasizing temporality and tense shifts. I will begin by providing some context for residential school redress discourse, looking at both ways in which it is problematic and also why it has become central to Aboriginal redress campaigns. I will then move to a discussion of how Alexie's novel resists the implicit rules of redress discourse to explore the effects of colonialism beyond the schools and on the intimate relationships of Aboriginal people. I will end by demonstrating how the novel's failure to imagine positive healing experiences for the female characters risks normalizing both patriarchy and violence against women, finally focusing on some contemporary challenges facing Aboriginal women and children. …

Analysis of Interpersonal Meaning in Public Speeches—A Case Study of Obama’s Speech

This paper uses the opening speech given by president Obama at a prime time news conference commemorating his first 100th day in office as the sample and tries to explore how interpersonal meaning is achieved from the perspective of Functional Grammar and with the focus on mood, modal auxiliary, personal pronouns in pronoun system, and tense shift. The finding shows that Obama makes full use of the language to achieve his political purpose in his speech by using different devices to fulfill interpersonal meaning.

'Language has a Heart': Linguistic Markers of Evaluation in Selected TRC Testimonies

This paper explores how two testifiers at the Human Rights Violation hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 used selected markers of evaluation (shifts in tense, the inclusion of direct speech and code-switching) to express evaluative meanings and position themselves, the police and their audiences in relation to their narratives. Both testifiers are mothers of young activists who were pursued, detained and tortured by police in the 1980s. The paper argues that it is through the subtle though significant linguistic choices the women make that their perspective is construed and their 'narrative truth' realised.

Direct and indirect speech in straight-talking Israeli

Israeli is currently one of the official languages of the State of Israel. It is a fusional synthetic language, with non-concatenative discontinuous morphemes realised by vowel infixation. This typological paper demonstrates that there is a clear distinction in Israeli between direct and indirect speech. The indirect speech report, which is a subset of complement clauses, is characterized by a shift in person, spatial and temporal deixis. However, unlike in English, the verbs usually do not undergo a tense shift. Israeli has various lexicalized direct speech reports. By and large, Israeli reported speech constructions reflect Yiddish and Standard Average European patterns, often enhancing a suitable pre-existent Hebrew construction.

Whither and Yon, and How

1 What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? ('Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,' ll. 7-10) GINGERLY IS HOW I OPENED THE THICK PACKET LINDA HUGHES HAD SENT. IT rumbled forth a salvo of essays from scholars deemed likeliest to succeed in the advanced study of Victorian poetry, which was to say likeliest to become our successors, which was not to say bent on superannuating us, not quite that exactly, and yet.... The emergence on our secluded scene of a generation substantial in number, energetic in hope, and fertile in thought came as great news, made better to me by a contributors' roster sporting the names of many I had taught as students and several I called friends. Still, the brash promise of all those essays was damped, somehow, by my rash promise to comment on them. In prospect the young lighthearted masters of new waves, breasting mackerel-crowded seas in their merry Grecian coaster, brought out the grave Tyrian trader in me. It stayed this dyer's purple hand, subdued to what it worked in. Where these smart youth knew Whither, mustn't I make do with sagely remembering Whence, and so dwindle into the court historian of a relegated realm? Vide passim J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, and tremble. Or else call it a senior scholar moment and forget it. For I felt better--I usually do--once I started to read. In general the contributors turned out to be addressing the editor's question about Whither with remarks about How. They weren't telling us where to go after all, or where to get off either, but were instead recommending ways of getting started and manners of proceeding. Their collective dispatch had less to do with what a revitalized scholarly-critical enterprise would disclose about Victorian poetry than with the instruments of that enterprise, the means of study that were to be adopted towards such disclosure. In other words, the contributors wrote for the most part as advocates and exponents of method, often (predictably, understandably) of the methods informing their current research. This circumstance freed me--it frees me now, by the performative power of this tense shift--to exchange the historian's bulky robe for the light lab coat of the methodologist, to shore up the endangered distinction between method and methodology (whereby the latter is properly the study of the former), and to dedicate this space to a methodological overview of the VP special issue. It's still rather a jungle out there, is Victorian poetry, riddled with old roads much overgrown and markers nigh obliterated. Now here come two dozen expeditionaries, abuzz with talk of navigation, negotiation, intervention, deployment, and transgression, to offer pathfinding guidance that mixes map-reading skill with bushwhacking chutzpah. My job is to survey the offers, speculate where I can about destinations, and offer an educated guess as to road conditions and attractions by the way. I should probably announce an (admittedly immethodical) itinerary of my own in these matters. My zeal is for initiatives that investigate--precisely because they admire and fear it--the historical power of form. Interpreting literary in as broad a sense as can be, provided retains a technical sense that furnishes analytic purchase, I take form to be the chief agency by which Victorian cultural meanings were organized, transmitted, and enforced. Especially in the nineteenth-century heyday of print, when it came to cultural dominance form was the way and the truth; form was each of these two things because it was the other; and it was most conspicuously both in the genre of poetry. For, by long-standing consensus if not by definition, among kinds poetry excels at merging its content with its technique. Furthermore, as much in this special VP issue teaches us freshly to understand, the technical means of Victorian as of all poetry were culturally and historically bounded. …

Time, Narrative Intimacy and the Child

The British version of Jean de Brunhoff’s Histoire de Babar is a striking example of the transition from the present to the past tense in the translation of children’s texts into English. With reference to theories of narrative time, this paper invites speculation on the impact of such a tense shift on the present-tense qualities of the original, on the performance of a shared reading by child and adult and, finally, on the relevance of the young child’s developing understanding of the role of tense in narrative.

BOOK REVIEW: Patricia Ingham.Invisible Writing and the Victorian Novel: Readings in Language and Ideology. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In Invisible Writing Patricia Ingham attempts what she describes as making visible those aspects of narrative fiction that normally go unseen or unnoticed, especially deixis, narrative ambivalence or questioning, negation, and shifts in tense. In order to pursue her unmasking of these narrative functions, she necessarily adopts a formalist approach to reading six well-known and widely taught Victorian novels: Vanity Fair (1847-48), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Daniel Deronda (1876), Bleak House (1852-53), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Little Dorrit (1855-57). Making these narrative techniques more readily visible to readers will provide material for a discussion of the relationship between language and ideology.

Valeurs représentative et énonciative du « présentatif » c'est et marquage du point de vue

Alain Rabatel : C'est as a point of view marker in fictional narratives C'est has a double representational value in narratives: firstly because it signals the introduction a new object, secondly because it implies a perceiving or thinking "subject of consciousness" that validates the first representational value. This is why c'est is enough to introduce by itself a light point of view effect in the narrative and may become a full point of view marker, when coming along with a perfective to imperfective tense shift. All this is obviously of highest importance in the reading of narratives, since such linguistic devices strengthen the readers's referential illusion and identification with the character or narrator, hence legitimize possible interpretative inferences. effect in the narrative and may become a full point of view marker, when coming along with a perfective to imperfective tense shift. All this is obviously of highest importance in the reading of narratives, since such linguistic devices strengthen the readers's referential illusion and identification with the character or narrator, hence legitimize possible interpretative inferences.

Code-switching and register shift: Evidence from Finnish-English child bilingual conversation

In this paper, we attempt to place code-switching in the more comprehensive framework of register change, a feature in all human conversation. We want to argue that code-switching, while unique to bilinguals for obvious reasons, may also be approached as one of the many markers of register change, register change itself taking place in all populations. Fifty-three minutes of naturally occurring conversation by two Finnish-English bilingual children were taped and transcribed. Several patterns emerged: in spontaneous play, the subjects, adopting other characters, spoke their L2, English, while the negotiation of the play often, but not exclusively, took place in the L1, Finnish. While in our data English, the L2 of the subjects, is restricted to in-character talk, code-switching to Finnish is not the sole marker of change from play to negotiation. The onset of the negotiation segments is also marked prosodically by voice quality changes, and grammatically, by interrogatives, imperatives, deictic terms, and shifts in tense. On the basis of our data, we suggest that while code-switching indeed very often occurs when the speaker shifts from one conversational task to another, the shift is often marked by other means as well, providing evidence for code-switching as a register variation.

Linguistic perspective in short news stories

Textual perspective is the introduction of a subjective viewpoint that restricts the validity of the presented information to a particular person in the discourse. Strong perspective is accomplished through quotation and focalization, that is, presentation of narrative material through a character's discourse or consciousness. Subtle perspective that introduces an implicit viewpoint, is accomplished by a variety of linguistic features such as tense shifts and marked choices of referring expressions. The effect of the two kinds of perspective on readers' appreciation of news texts and stories was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, news text and story versions with subtle and strong perspective were presented along with neutralized versions. Focalization made news text versions unacceptable, but was unproblematic in story versions. Text versions with focalization were judged as more subjective, more suspenseful, and livelier than versions without perspective. The failure of subtle perspective alone to show reliable effects in this experiment may have been due to the presence of the unacceptable focalized versions. Those versions were excluded from Experiment 2, where versions with subtle perspective were compared to neutralized versions. This restricted comparison yielded a positive effect of subtle perspective on acceptability and affective judgments.

Evidence of a Tense Shift in Personal Experience Narratives

“Danger of death” narratives were collected and analyzed for their use of the historical present tense. The historical present tense in these narratives serves as a signal which fingerprints their identity as “danger of death” narratives and, thus, has a potential application in artificial intelligence programs.

Aspect, Tense, and Time Shifts in Tikar

Aspect, Tense, and Time Shifts in Tikar

Deixis in memory for verb tense

Two experiments tested cued recall of sentences in either the present, past, future, present perfect, past perfect, or future perfect tenses. In Experiment I, 45% of the sentences were recalled with shifts in the verb tense, thus partially replicating the results of Clark and Stafford (1969) . However, the shifts appeared to be due to lack of temporal context (time deixis) rather than loss of marked semantic features. In Experiment II temporal adverbs were added to half of the sentences in order to provide a partial temporal framework. Tenseshifting was markedly reduced in sentences with temporal adverbs, thus supporting a memory-for-ideas theory with the specific condition that verb tenses are relatively meaningless without a temporal decitic context.