The tense tag has no wiki summary.
5
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2answers
162 views
Is there a difference between a preterite and an aorist?
I am reading about aorist and preterite verb forms. It seems that they are both forms which express perfective aspect and past tense. Is the difference between them simply in differing terminology or ...
1
vote
1answer
71 views
What does “speech time” mean?
Tense is the grammatical expression of the location of events in time. It anchors (or ‘grounds’) an event to the speaker’s experience
of the world by relating the event time to a point of ...
1
vote
1answer
107 views
Is 'should' a Tense?
I'm trying to write a syntax tree structure of a sentence with the word 'should'. It's a long sentence, so to simply, let's take this sentence instead:
I should play the piano.
I'm not sure ...
3
votes
0answers
63 views
Do languages with high use of grammatical aspect generally lack grammatical tense?
From my understanding of Chinese, the language lacks any sort of grammatical tense but is instead very aspect driven when describing actions.
Is this a reoccurring pattern among languages with a high ...
6
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0answers
90 views
Which indigenous languages have marked Ancestral/Mythological Past in grammars?
I have found a mention on such a system among some South American native languages in Adam Jacot de Boinod's book 'I Never New There's A Word For It'.
Non-academic reading, which doesn't make it ...
2
votes
1answer
95 views
How is the hesternal past, crastinal future etc. conveyed?
Hesternal Past tense describes an event occurred yesterday (in an absolute tense system) or the day preceding the day under consideration (in a relative system) and the crastinal future describes and ...
1
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4answers
153 views
What is the present tense expressing future?
Perhaps this question has been asked before, I may have looked for the wrong terms then because I haven't found the answer.
I would like to know more about the usage of the present tense in sentences ...
2
votes
2answers
103 views
What's the best term for the group of concepts pertaining to verbs which includes tense, mood, and aspect?
There are many named concepts which relate to verbs across many languages.
The three most well known would be tense, aspect, and mood. But person, number, and voice are others, and there must be many ...
5
votes
1answer
137 views
Why isn't the future participle more diffuse in modern languages?
The Ancient Greek had a participle for the future tense, and the only language I know it uses the future tense is Esperanto.
Is there a reason why the future participle appears to be rare ...
10
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0answers
184 views
Is there any language that doesn't express Tense but allows “aspectual coercion”?
Mandarin Chinese appears to be a language that may not express tense (at least in the way I will define below), and it does not seem to allow aspectual coercion.
By not expressing Tense I mean, such ...
4
votes
2answers
161 views
How did English and Portuguese develop the construction “have+pp”?
Native Portuguese speakers (myself included) often have a hard time dealing with the English present perfect tense-aspect.
In English, the present perfect is used for expressing past actions with ...
21
votes
2answers
343 views
Are there any non-Indo-European languages with go-periphrasis?
Some Indo-European languages have a construction called go-periphrasis, by which some form of the verb go is used in conjunction with the main verb to mark tense. Most languages that have this feature ...
