Understanding Of Tense Research Articles

Grammatical Errors in Using Tenses Made by ESP Students

Sometimes the students of ESP or Non-English majoring error in using tenses. The low level of students' understanding of tense is one of the factors that greatly influences errors in making sentences. The objective of this research was to describe the students’ errors and its causes in using tenses. In this research, the writers used a qualitative method in a form of descriptive analysis (percentage) that included observation, collecting the students’ test, analyzing, and interpreting the data. For collecting the data, the researcher used test as the instrument. This research was conducted to 35 ESP students of Pharmaceutical Study Program of Institute of Health Science of Siti Khadijah Palembang. The result of the research showed that the percentage of the error made by 35 students as the samples in using tenses was 75%, consisted of the error of selection was 30%, the error of omission was 24% and error of ordering 21%. It means that the students of Pharmaceutical Study Program of Institute of Health Science of Siti Khadijah Palembang made error in using tense, because more than 70% of the students made error. The probable sources of the students’ error were interlanguage error and context in learning error, where 52% errors were caused by interlanguage.

English Tense Teaching in Junior High School Based on Prototype Theory—Taking the Simple Present Tense as an Example

Simple present tense, an indispensable part of grammar, is the first tense that junior high school students need to grasp in China. In fact, the time things happen does not always correspond with the speech time. Therefore, in the process of teaching, there are some difficulties which would exert great negative influence on students’ understanding of tense. There are five usages of simple present tense: state, habitual, instantaneous, past and future usage. On the basis of the prototype theory of categorization, these five usages in simple present tense are all members of this category. Moreover, the present-connectiveness, as the family resemblance, combines these five usages into the present tense category. It is necessary and meaningful for teachers to integrate prototype theory with tense-teaching. In other words, teachers can help students establish a network system which holds all usages of this tense. It can greatly ease students’ burdens in comprehension and memory with the forms and usages of the simple present tense. Eventually, the teaching efficiency can be improved to some extent.

Grammar as Science: Beauzée’s Theory of Tense and the Metaphysics of Time

This article aims to deepen our understanding of Nicolas Beauzée’s (1717–89) attempt to establish a science of grammar modeled upon natural philosophy. At the heart of this endeavor stood Beauzee’s analysis of grammatical time. Beauzée’s tense theory, first published in 1765, had a profound impact on our understanding of tense as a complex system of reference, establishing order relations between events described within discourse and the moment of speech. While historians of linguistics have recognized Beauzée’s contribution to the theory of tense, its greater significance has not been hitherto appreciated: Beauzée reinvented general grammar as a modern science combining Cartesian and Newtonian principles. Building on Port-Royal’s notion of general grammar, Beauzée sought to establish “grammatical metaphysics”—a sure foundation for a science of grammar. This aspiration, especially evident in his theory of grammatical time, together with Beauzée’s numerous references to physics, astronomy, geography, geometry, and metaphysics, amounted to an elaborate strategy of scientification, taking the natural sciences not merely as inspiration but as a coveted epistemological ideal for general grammar’s scientific remodeling.

Physics’ silence on time

In this paper I argue that physics is, always was, and probably always will be voiceless with respect to tense and passage, and that, therefore, if, as I believe, tense and passage are the essence of time, physics’ contribution to our understanding of time can only be limited. The argument, in a nutshell, is that if "physics has no possibility of expression for the Now", to quote Einstein, then it cannot add anything to the study of tense and passage, and specifically, cannot add anything to the debate between deniers and affirmers of the existence or reality of tense and passage. Since relativity theory did not equip physics with a new language with which to speak of tense and passage, I draw the further conclusion that relativity theory has not generated the revolution to our conception of time that is attributed to it. In the last section I discuss the motivations behind the continued but misguided attempts to integrate tense into a relativistic setting, and assess the manners in which relativity theory has nevertheless enhanced, albeit indirectly, our understanding of tense and passage.

Developing a visual temporal modeller: applying an extensible nlp system to support learners’ understanding of tense and aspect in English

AbstractThis paper reports on the development of a prototype tool which shows how learners can be helped to reflect upon the accuracy of their writing. Analysis of samples of freely written texts by intermediate and advanced learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) showed evidence of weakness in the use of tense and aspect. Computational discourse modelling techniques were applied to the data to generate semantic models of fragments of the narratives with particular focus on their temporal structure. These models have been converted into dynamic graphical representations of the temporal relationships between discourse events as the narratives are written. The system also provides access to the ontology devised to model individual events and this offers learners insights into the events’ semantic properties. These techniques provide the basis for a stimulating learning tool capable of capturing key elements of written narratives, and prompting learners’ awareness of language use, particularly tense and aspect.

The role of the input in the acquisition of third person singular verbs in English.

During the early stages of language acquisition, children pass through a stage of development when they produce both finite and nonfinite verb forms in finite contexts (e.g., "it go there," "it goes there"). Theorists who assume that children operate with an abstract understanding of tense and agreement marking from the beginnings of language use tend to explain this phenomenon in terms of either performance limitations in production (e.g., V. Valian, 1991) or the optional use of finite forms in finite contexts due to a lack of knowledge that tense and agreement marking is obligatory (the optional infinitive hypothesis; K. Wexler, 1994, 1996). An alternative explanation, however, is that children's use of nonfinite forms is based on the presence of questions in the input ("Where does it go?") where the grammatical subject is immediately followed by a nonfinite verb form. To compare these explanations, 2 groups of 24 children aged between 2 years 6 months and 3 years were exposed to 6 known and 3 novel verbs produced in either declaratives or questions or in both declaratives and questions. The children were then questioned to elicit use of the verbs in either finite or nonfinite contexts. The results show that for novel verbs, the children's patterns of verb use were closely related to the patterns of verb use modeled in the language to which they were exposed. For known verbs, there were no differences in the children's use of individual verbs, regardless of the specific patterns of verb use modeled in the language they heard. The implications of these findings for theories of early verb use are discussed.