Word Order and Tense Choice in Standard Written French

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dulcie M. Engel
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Passe Compose

SUMMARY In modern French, the use of simple and composed tenses varies with respect to word order in two specific cases: firstly with subject inversion, and secondly with insertion of material between the auxiliary and the past participle. With the 'passé simple' (past historic) and the 'passé composé' (perfect), both of which can express past punctual actions, this difference in word order may influence tense choice. If a particular effect (contrast, emphasis...) is desired in the phrase, either the 'passé simple' or the 'passé composé' can be used to express the punctual past, the choice being dependent on their respective influence on word order. RESUME L'emploi des temps simples et des temps composés en français moderne diffère du point de vue de l'ordre de mots, en deux cas spécifiques: premièrement, avec l'inversion du sujet; et deuxièmement avec la possibilité de l'insertion de mots entre l'auxiliaire et le participe passé. Pour le passé simple et le passé composé, qui expriment tous les deux des actions passées et ponctuelles, cette différence d'ordre peut influencer le choix du temps: si l'on désire creer un effet particulier dans la phrase (contraste, emphase...), on pourrait employer soit le passé simple, soit le passé composé pour exprimer le passé ponctuel, selon leur influence sur l'ordre des mots.

scholarly journals Floating affixes in Polish

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Berthold Crysmann
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
General Treatment ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
Inflectional Features

The morphosyntactic status of Polish past tense agreement markers has been a matter of considerable debate in recent years (Spencer 1991, Borsley & Rivero 1994, Borsley 1999, Bański 2000, Kupść 2000, Kupść & Tseng 2005). Past tense agreement is expressed by a set of bound forms that either attach to the past participle, or else float off to a host further to the left. Despite this relative freedom of attachment, it is often noted in the literature, e.g., Borsley 1999, Kupść & Tseng 2005, that the combination of verbal host and agreement marker forms a word-like unit. In this paper I will argue that these agreement markers are best analysed as affixes uniformly introduced on the verb whose inflectional features they realise. Building on the linearisation-based theory of morphology-syntax interaction proposed in Crysmann 2003, syntactic mobility of morphologically introduced material will be captured by mapping phonological contributions to multiple lexically introduced domain objects. It will be shown that this is sufficient to capture the relevant data, and connect the placement of floating affixes to the general treatment of Polish word order Kupść 2000.

scholarly journals The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Structure: A Comparative Approach

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-166
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Guéron
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Auxiliary Verb ◽  
Passe Compose

The article covers some issues that concern the syntax and semantics of the present perfect construction in English and other languages. It states that all Present Perfects may be associated with what is considered the canonical construal in which an assertion is located at the present time but reports the existence of a past situation. However, some Present Perfects may, in addition, have a simple past aorist meaning. The author focuses on pluractional and evidential construals of the Present Perfect in some languages, argue that the Passé Composé construal and the Aorist construal of the perfect construction belong to two different modes of discourse, discours and récit, underlines their variability associated with a complex syntactic structure (an auxiliary verb and a verbal participle for Present Perfect, while the Aorist construal is associated with a simple verbal structure). According to the author, the Perfect has both syntactic and analytical ways of realization, thus the analytical syntactic structure of the Perfect is in English, French and German, with both a tensed auxiliary verb and a past participle, whereas it is synthetic in Latin, Russian and Arabic as is presented in the past participle alone; in languages with overt aspectual marking, aspect may vary on either the auxiliary, if it exists, or on the participle.

Why is this happened? Passive morphology and unaccusativity

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Balcom
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Unaccusative Verbs

Zobl discussed inappropriate passive morphology (‘be’ and the past participle) in the English writing of L2 learners, linking its occurrence to the class of unaccusative verbs and proposing that learners subsume unaccusatives under the syntactic rule for passive formation. The research reported here supports and amplifies Zobl' proposal, based on a grammaticality judgement task and a controlled production task containing verbs from a variety of subclasses of unaccusatives. The tasks were administered to Chinese L1 learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. Results show that subjects both used and judged as grammatical inappropriate passive morphology with all verbs falling under the rubric of unaccusativity. The article concludes with linguistic representations which maintain Zobl’s insights but are consistent with current theories of argument structure.

Past participles of strong verbs in Jutland Danish: A real-time study of regionalization and standardization

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torben Juel Jensen ◽  
Marie Maegaard
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Time Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Standardization Process ◽  
Large Corpus ◽  
Strong Verbs

The article presents a real-time study of standardization and regionalization processes with respect to the use of past participles of strong verbs in the western part of Denmark. Analyses of a large corpus of recordings of informants from two localities show that the use of the dialectalenform of the past participle suffix has been in decline during the last 30 years. Theenforms are replaced by three other forms, one of which is (partly) dialectal, one regional and one standard Danish. The study indicates that a regionalization process has taken place prior to the time period studied, but that it has now been overtaken by a Copenhagen-based standardization process. The study also shows interesting differences between the two localities, arguably due to the geographical location and size, and to the status of the different participle forms in the traditional local dialects.

The ge- Prefix of the Past Participle

1968 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Richard K. Seymour
Keyword(s):  
Past Participle ◽  
The Past

The verbal system

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-231
Author(s):  
D. Gary Miller
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Verbal System ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
System P ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Weak Verbs

Verbs in Gothic are thematic, athematic, or preterite present. Several classes, including modals, are discussed. Strong verbs have seven classes, weak verbs four. Inflectional categories are first, second, and third person, singular, dual (except in the third person), and plural number. Tenses are nonpast and past/preterite. There are two inflected moods, indicative and optative, and two voices (active, passive). The passive is synthetic in the nonpast indicative and optative. The past system features two periphrastic passives, one stative-eventive with wisan (be), the other inchoative and change of state with wairþan (become). Middle functions are mostly represented by simple reflexive structures and -nan verbs. Nonfinite categories include one voice-underspecified infinitive, a nonpast and past participle, and a present active imperative. The third person imperative is normally expressed by an optative.

The Past Participle

1976 ◽  
pp. 77-106
Author(s):  
Domenico Parisi
Keyword(s):  
Past Participle ◽  
The Past
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