scholarly journals Target Variation as a Contributing Factor in TAML2 Production

2021 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 39-51
Author(s):  
Paz González ◽  
Carmen Kleinherenbrink

This study aims to clarify whether variation in the target language can influence its acquisition. More specifically, this study describes the acquisition of Spanish as a second language (L2) by examining the learning process based on (a) the first language (L1) of the learner and (b) which Spanish dialect is being learnt (the target). The phenomenon under scrutiny is the use of past tenses in the L2, as it has been proven to adequately measure the competence of the learner. Data from two L2 at-home-classroom student groups in the Netherlands, divided by either a European or Latin American oriented study program, has been collected. The task that they have made is a written narrative that elicits past verb forms in hodiernal and prehodiernal contexts. Our data shows a clear distinction in the preference of the past tense forms that each of the groups has, that can only be explained by looking at the Spanish variety which both program offers

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van der Linden

In the literature about fossilization, several definitions have been given and several explanations have been suggested for this phenomenon. I see fossilization as a long-time stagnation in the T2 learning process, leading to errors based on transfer. Fossilization is caused by sociolinguistic, pyscholinguistic and purely linguistic factors. In this paper I concentrate on the acquisition of syntactic structures and on the role of input and instruction in that process. I argue that, although in the acquisition of some syntactic structures, UG plays an important role, this does not account for the whole learning process: learners have not only to reset parameters when acquiring T2 but have to proceduralize knowledge based on the surface structure of sentences. In the case of the use of past tenses in French, many of the Dutch advanced learners of three different levels of proficiency do not acquire native-like intuitions about the use of these tenses, although input as well as instruction are thorough on this point. I suggest that the past tense system is not UG-dependent and that the instruction does not allow proceduralization of the knowledge.


1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary A. Cziko ◽  
Keiko Koda

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language between the ages of 1;0 and 4;11 in an attempt to find evidence for two of Bickerton's (1981) proposed language acquisition universals, which form part of the language bioprogram hypothesis of language acquisition. As predicted by Bickerton's state-process hypothesis, it was found that all sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Also, with only one exception, all omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of ‘mixed’ verbs, i.e. verbs which behave syntactically as process verbs in Japanese but are nonetheless semantically stative. However, contrasting with Bickerton's hypothesis that children initially use the past tense to mark punctuality, no relationship between past tense use and punctuality was found.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Marina Akimova

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.


1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Sprigg
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

Tibetan orthography looks phonetically challenging, to say the least; and one may well wonder whether such tongue-twisting combinations as the brj of brjes, the blt- of bltas, or the bst- of bstan ever did twist a Tibetan tongue, or whether the significance of these and other such orthographic forms might not have been morphophonemic in origin, with the letters r, l, and s in the syllable initial of forms such as these serving to associate these past-tense forms lexically with their corresponding present-tense forms; e.g. Viewed in relation to Tibetan orthography the past-tense forms of a class of verbs in the Golok dialect seem to support this hypothesis. Table 1, below, contains a number of examples of Golok verbs in their past-tense and present-tense forms to illustrate a type of phonological analysis suited to that view of the r syllable-initial unit in the Golok examples, and, indirectly, in the WT examples too (the symbols b and b will be accounted for in section (B) below).


Linguistics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Midori Hayashi ◽  
David Y. Oshima

AbstractIt is a common perception that in languages having multiple past tenses with different remoteness specifications, the past tenses cover the entire past without a gap or overlap. This paper demonstrates that this way of looking at multiple-past tense systems is not appropriate for the system in South Baffin Inuktitut (a variety of the Inuit language). The dialect has at least four past tenses: recent, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal, and distant. We argue that the relation between the four tenses cannot be represented by a simple linear scheme for two reasons. First, the pre-hodiernal past has a special status as the “conventionally designated alternative”, which is chosen in cases of remoteness indeterminacy, analogous to, for example, the Russian masculine gender being used in cases of gender indeterminacy. Second, there is overlap in their coverage. The pre-hodiernal and hodiernal past tenses collectively cover the entire past and thus any past situation can be described with one of them. The other two provide means to make more fine-grained and subjective temporal specifications. Comparison will be made between the system in South Baffin Inuktitut and those in some Bantoid languages which have been pointed out in the literature to have a comparable layered system of tenses.


2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sampson

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant. Data on spontaneous speech in Britain in the 1990s partly supports this by showing marked regional variation in the use of the Perfect construction. However, some nonstandard past tenses cannot be explained in terms of a nonstandard qualifier system.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Ahkam Arifin ◽  
Suryani Jihad ◽  
Sri Mulyani ◽  
Hardiani Ardin ◽  
Nurwahida Nurwahida

This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that there appears a systematic order of the acquisition of past tenses. It is claimed that irregular past tense verbs are acquired earlier than regular past tense verbs. In comparison to the acquisition of irregular and regular past verbs, the acquisition of the past copula be forms `was` and `were` is believed to take place much earlier. To test this hypothesis, the data were collected from forty-six students who were asked to write an essay with a minimum of 250 words to get data of the use of past tenses. The findings reveal partial support for the hypothesis, suggesting that the universal order of morpheme acquisition may not be a stable phenomenon.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Yasir Alotaibi

This paper discusses tense in Arabic based on three varieties of the language: Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the Taif dialect (TD). We argue against previous analyses that suggest that Arabic is a tenseless language, which assume that tense information is derived from the context. We also argue against the suggestion that Arabic is tensed, but that its tense is relative, rather than absolute. We propose here that CA, MSA, and TD have closely related verb forms, and that these are tensed verbs. Tense in Arabic is absolute in a neutral context and verb forms take the perfective and imperfective aspect. Similar to other languages including English, verb forms in Arabic may take reference from the context instead of the present moment. In this case, we argue that this does not mean that tense in Arabic is relative, because this would also imply that tense in many languages, including English, is relative. Further, we argue that the perfective form indicates only the past tense and the imperfective form, only the present; all other interpretations are derived by implicature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Al Qahtani Khulud ◽  
Al Zahrani Mohammad

This paper focuses on the obligatory movement operations that Najdi Arabic (NA) verb forms must undergo to satisfy the morphosyntactic requirements within the minimalist program (MP). Recall that the practice of the MP syntactic theory, including its further advancements, proposed by Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2001) springs from the fact that the grammar of a language starts basically from the lexicon from which suitable words are selected to form clauses. The selected words undergo some syntactic operations such as Merge, by which larger constituents are formed, and Move, by which the formed constituents move to higher positions in the hierarchy to fulfil some specific syntactic purposes. When the elements have undergone the operations of Merge and Move they are spelled out into phonetic forms (PF) and logical forms (LF). In light of this, we argue that NA verbs start out as roots in the head of VP before merging with the vocalic affixes in the head of Tax-AspP to satisfy the subjectverb agreement requirements and mark the aspect features. Perfective verb forms must then continue to move to T to merge with the past tense abstract features while imperfective forms stay in Tax-AspP. The thematic subject is generated in Spec,VP; it may stay there to derive the VSO order, or move higher to derive the SVO order. The findings show that obligatory movements indicate interactions between the functional categories of TP, Tax-AspP and VP: NA verbal roots obligatorily move to Tax-Asp to derive (im)perfective forms; perfectives obligatorily move to T.


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