scholarly journals Sequence-of-tense and the features of finite tenses

Nordlyd ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Zagona
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Syntactic Category ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Evaluation Time ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Sequence Of Tense

<p>Sequence-of-tense (SOT) is often described as a (past) tense verb form that does not correspond to a semantically interpretable tense. Since SOT clauses behave in other respects like finite clauses, the question arises as to whether the <em>syntactic category</em> Tense has to be distinguished from the <em>functional category</em> tense.  I claim that SOT clauses do in fact contain interpretable PRESENT tense.  The “past” form is analyzed as a manifestation of agreement with the (matrix past) controller of the SOT clause evaluation time.  One implication of this analysis is that finite verb forms should be analyzed as representing features that correspond to functional categories higher in clause structure, including those of the clausal left periphery. SOT morphology then sheds light on the existence of a series of finer-grained functional heads that contribute to tense construal, and to verbal paradigms. These include Tense, Modality and Force.</p>

scholarly journals Obligatory Movement Operations for Verbal Roots in Najdi Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Al Qahtani Khulud ◽  
Al Zahrani Mohammad
Keyword(s):  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Najdi Arabic

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.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Compound Verbs ◽  
Finite Verb

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.  

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Right ◽  
Theoretical Analyses

Over roughly the last decade, there has been a notable rise in new research on historical German syntax in a generative perspective. This volume presents a state-of-the-art survey of this thriving new line of research by leading scholars in the field, combining it with new insights into the syntax of historical German. It is the first comprehensive and concise generative historical syntax of German covering numerous central aspects of clause structure and word order, tracing them throughout various historical stages. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis and valid descriptive generalizations with reference also to the more traditional topological model of the German clause with a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. The volume is divided into three parts according to the main parts of the clause: the left periphery dealing with verbal placement and the filling of the prefield (verb second, verb first, verb third orders) as well as adverbial connectives; the middle field including discussion of pronominal syntax, order of full NPs and the history of negation; and the right periphery with chapters on basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex including the development of periphrastic verb forms and the phenomena of IPP (infinitivus pro participio) and ACI (accusativus cum infinitivo). This book thus provides a convenient overview of current research on the major issues concerning historical German clause structure both for scholars interested in more traditional description and for those interested in formal accounts of diachronic syntax.

scholarly journals “The Trout Breaks the Ice” by Mikhail Kuzmin: Verse and Grammar

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Marina Akimova
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Complex Composition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Compositional Structure ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Astronomical Time ◽  
Mikhail Kuzmin ◽  
Iambic Pentameter ◽  
Finite Verb

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.

Varia: On ‘speaker ghosting’ and the ‘sequence of tense and mood’ rule in the bulgarian language

Proglas ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krasimir Kabakchiev
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sequence Of Tense

The analysis of sentences taking part in the semantico-syntactic ‘X said that [content of that]’ schema, in the second part of which verb forms in all nine Bulgarian tenses are used, demonstrates that five of the types of sentences obtained are non-grammatical, and four are grammatical. In the main cases, with the aorist and the imperfect, which are witness-forms, non-grammaticality is due to speaker ghosting, a phenomenon which has been revealed by the author in previous publications. Non-grammaticality with the future in the past and the pluperfect is due to the fact that the verb forms have non-cancelable content, and not because they are witness-forms, as claimed by some authors. The main conclusion of the study, in contrast to previous conceptions in Bulgarian grammars and in Bulgarian linguistics in general, is that the Bulgarian language has a ‘sequence of tense and mood’ rule.

scholarly journals The Golok Dialect and Written Tibetan past-tense verb forms

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

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).

scholarly journals Verb Form and Tense in Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Yasir Alotaibi
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
Neutral Context ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
English Verb ◽  
Modern Standard

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.

The distribution of quantifiers in Old and Modern Italian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacopo Garzonio ◽  
Cecilia Poletto
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms

This chapter considers the distribution of VO and OV orders in Old Italian when the object is represented by a quantified constituent. The investigation takes into consideration cases of VO/OV variation with complex analytic verb forms where V is the past participle and O contains a universal or a negative quantifier. It is shown that while OV with non-quantified DPs and complex QPs is optional, universal bare quantifiers always precede the past participle. It is proposed that bare quantifiers undergo obligatory movement to a dedicated position, which is a function of their internal structure. Moreover, it is argued that the modern stage of the language has preserved the movement of the quantifier, but this is not always visible because of a change in the movement properties of the verb: in generalized verb-second Old Italian the past participle remains trapped inside the vP left-periphery while it raises higher in Modern Italian.

A Japanese child's use of stative and punctual verbs

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary A. Cziko ◽  
Keiko Koda
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Process ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Early Use ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Present Progressive

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.

scholarly journals El pretérito pluscuamperfecto como marca de género narrativo en el español andino del Noroeste de la Argentina

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-167
Author(s):  
Lidia Chang ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Andean Spanish ◽  
Mutual Relation ◽  
Northwest Argentina ◽  
The Past ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Verb Forms

In her research about the past tense forms from the Quechua Southern Conchucos lands (Ancash, Peru), Hintz (2007) finds equivalences between some functions of the narrative structure of both the past tense in Quechua and the past tense in Spanish among the bilingual speakers of Quechua-Spanish. In this work, we analyze a group of not-experienced native speakers’ oral testimonies of Andean Spanish from Northwest Argentina. We seek to find a mutual relation between evidential and affect functions of the Quechua suffix -na: and the use of the pluperfect of Andean Spanish. Our findings show that there is a partial grammar barrowing between the two forms. We envisage also that the pluperfect appears remarkably more often in certain parts of the narrative structure, usually along with one of the decir verb forms as a metadiscursive markers (Chang, 2018 and 2019).

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