Questions tagged [tense]
A grammatical category expressing the time when a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.
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Tensed infinitives across languages
As the Latin language shows, infinitives can be marked for tense (amare - present, amavisse - perfect).
English also shows that: to love, to have loved.
Can anyone suggest any literature regarding the ...
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How does tense evolve from a tenseless parent language?
Whenever someone asks something about TAM evolution, they seem to inevitably be pointed towards the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Kuteva et al., 2e, 2019) and The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, ...
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A basic question regarding "do-support"
In particular, the question is regarding the steps of the process. The following sentence is to be used as an example:
(a) John ate.
(b) Did John eat?
As per Radford and Chomsky, it is assumed that ...
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Why is the future tense almost completely regular in Portuguese?
In Portuguese (Br, and I think Pt too), the future tense of a verb can be created by taking its infinitive, and adding a suffix depending on the subject, e.g.:
to think -> pensar
I will think -> ...
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Why does the "passat perifràstic" use "anar" as an auxiliary?
In all other romance languages, to go + infinitive means that the action will happen in a near future, which makes sense intuitively, because metaphorically, we move toward an event which has not ...
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Having a hard time distinguishing between the simple and perfective aspects
It seems to me that the truth conditions for "David baked cookies" are identical to "David has baked cookies," in that both are true if at some moment of time in the past "...
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Reference text on Reichenbach's or Klein's work on the formal semantics of tense
I'm looking for a decent reference text on either Reicehnbach's or, more ideally, Klein's work on the formal semantics of tense with regards to topic time, event time, etc.
Klein's initial text on the ...
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Formal semantics of the coordination of tense and modality
There seems to be a good amount of work on the formal semantics of tense, e.g. statements of the form "Dave ate the cookie," and also of modality, e.g. statements of the form "Dave ...
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Canonical treatment of tense and modality within formal semantics
I'm thinking about expressions like "Ronit must have won the game," where we have an intersection of tense and modality.
Conventional wisdom is to use Kratzer's notion of ordering source and ...
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Any examples of any language bifurcating the past into past before one's life and past during one's life?
It can be either from a conlang or a natlang but I wasn't able to find any examples.
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Relation Between Unreal & Past Tense Forms
Background
I am learning English grammar. Having been confused about modal usage, I decided to pick out a book on the subject, coming to "Modality and the English Modals" by F. R. Palmer. In ...
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Argumentation for the existence of Tense phrase
I could not find syntactic arguments to support the existence of a separate T(ense) category inside the tree for the sentence “John rarely spends the weekend with his family”
As well as syntactic ...
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How are the meanings of "you will" in English formally categorized?
As someone with only my vague instincts as a native speaker to go off of, I would expect the breakdown comes to something like:
"You will find that he is not too receptive to this sort of thing&...
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Is it possible to make a statement without involving time?
All verbs seem to assume time. Is, was, will be, etc. I don't mean specific times, but the concept of time in general. Is it possible to make any statement without involving time?
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Present perfect tense vs simple past
I'm trying to understand the difference in meaning of these two. A site where I was learning German from explained like this:
The present perfect tense describes a past event that has present tense ...
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Why is tense obligatory in some languages and not in others?
In some languages like Chinese, it isn’t imperative that the tense of the verb is explicitly marked. So if you mean an action that will occur in the future, you can still refer to it in an all-...
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Are there human general communication languages without a future tendency?
In Thai language there is no past tense, at least not for negative sentences:
A Thai person might say "I don't go" (ฉัน ไม่ ไป) while the listener is expected to guess from the context if ...
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Is Affix Hopping Still a Thing?
Tense affixes used to be analysed to have moved downwards from T to V in English.
Is this analysis still current? Do minimalists still analyse it like this?
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How did multiple European languages start using future tense to refer to the present?
I recently noticed that German, English and Spanish seem to have a parallel colloquial use of their future tense, in which it's used to express a hypothesis about the present:
Literal meaning: I think ...
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The verb to have in relation to the past
In many Indo-European languages, you use the verb "to have" to describe the past. For example:
"I have been",
"J'ai été", (French)
"He estado" (Spanish)
"...
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what is the difference between reference time and event time
what is the difference between reference time and event time , also i am native Arabic speaker , i tried to translate by google translate two examples the reference time before and after event time ...
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Past Simple vs Present Perfect Continuous in questions [closed]
It is my first ask in this forum. I am not sure about proper grammar usage, so I want to ask someone who knows it well.
If I want to ask a person for a duration of time he has worked at the specific ...
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What's the difference between event time and reference time?
Here is an example, "Molly had left at 10 pm". The temporal references will be event time < reference time < speech time, right? But why?
Also, for "The sun has set", why ...
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Rules/Notions explaining/regulating seemingly non complementary combinations of inflections/conjugations/tenses
Note:
My original question was
[Sentences with strange/Incorrect(from English point of view) Time conjunctive][Conclusive verb form] combinations and aspects/nuances reflected?
Below is what I found ...
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Origin of "will" in Germanic, wouldn't it be subjunctive?
Small print: This is language specific about English, but tangential to Germanic to a certain degree that is likely out of ELU's scope. .
As a follow-up to this Q and several ones like it about the ...
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Are there languages that wouldn't use present tense to describe what is in a picture?
Since "present tense" might not be meaningful for some languages, the question could better be phrased as "Are there languages that wouldn't describe the actions in a picture with the same tenses or ...
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Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense?
Can first order logic represent a past occurring adverbial dependent clause with a present main clause to form the perfect tense?
Is this the way to represent an adverbial dependent clause with first ...
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Two questions about Icelandic (syntax)
The following sentence is from Icelandic language:
Mér vir›ast tNP [hestarnir vera seinir]
meDAT seemPL the-horsesNOM be slow
‘It seems to me that the horses are slow.'
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Is there empirical support for this implicational universal: "if a language has no plural morphology, it has no tense marking"?
The WALS map that crossclassifies number and past tense morphology shows that they tend to covary. I want to know if people with a deeper knowledge of linguistic typology can vouch for this ...
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Why does Spanish have obsolete tenses?
In Spanish, there are a few tenses that exist but are almost never used in daily life, like the subjunctive future and future perfect tenses. They are only utilized in legal documents and older pieces ...
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
Does English really have two tenses - present and past? Some linguists argue that it is a Latinate fallacy to think that English has three tenses.
Some English professors and even some native ...
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Does a difference of tense count as a difference of meaning in a minimal pair?
Does a difference in tense count as a difference in meaning in a minimal pair?
Here's a made up example to illustrate my question:
If we know that:
[wuga] means "read"
[wugi] means "reading"
Can ...
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Do most languages have the same basic verb tenses?
I am a student learning languages who is interested in linguistics! In trying to keep myself organized with my own study sheets, I wanted to know, do all languages have the same basic verb tenses? I'm ...
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What’s the standard way to gloss a morpheme that provides subject, object and tense?
If there a Leipzig standard to gloss a suffix like
“1st person subject, second person object, past tense”
My best guess is
1.S.2.O.Past
And then what if it’s first person exclusive
1.EXCL.S....
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Why is participial clause tenseless?
Participles, among the non-finite verbal inventory, most often appear to be taken by linguists as being tenseless or having the feature [-tense]. This is due to their interaction only with the Aspect ...
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Cases when past or present tense are the same in writing but convey the tenses while speaking [closed]
Warning: I have no background in linguistics, I just had a question that I thought of today.
I wrote this to someone: "I think old women from the 60's put their cigarettes in it."
And I was ...
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Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
It appears like Romanian has only 5 inflected/conjugated tenses (excluding imperative), while all other Romance languages have much more. For example, in Spanish, French and Italian, there are 7(8) ...
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Do we assume Tense head for tenseless languages?
Do we assume a TP/IP projection for the syntax of a tenseless language?
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Is there a term for 'relative' tenses?
By 'relative tenses', I mean a form of tense that is independent of the main tense that indicates when an event occurred relative to the past or future.
Examples in English would be:
Simple tense:
...
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Example of a tenseless sentence
I just learned about Tenseless languages, such as Chinese. But I'm interested to see what this looks like and/or means.
For example, wondering if one could write a tenseless sentence in English and ...
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Is there a language where semantic aspect determines which tense is unmarked in a verb?
For every language there is a tense that is morphologically closest to the root, e.g. English present is more basic than perfect since perfect either adds a suffix -(e)d or has ablaut as tense marker. ...
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Difference between tense & Grammatical aspect?
I know this question has been posed before, and I know also that there were different versions of putting it depending on models and different kinds of reasoning.
What I want to understand, is the ...
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Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?
The fictional language Flaidish has this feature. But I recently found out about a natural language (Mixtec) where the present isn't the base form of a verb, its the future tense.
I found this ...
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Suffix -ed indicating current state
I'm noticing that some English verbs use the -ed suffix to indicate the current state. Using this example: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/base
Specifically, the verb sense, ‘the film ...
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Are there languages where the tense depends on time elapsed between events?
In all the languages I am familiar with (mostly English and my native German as well as some rudimentary Italian and French, so all somewhat related.), the tense of a verb only indicates the time of ...
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What are some languages with inflected future tense?
I recently realized that English has no inflected future tense. I would like to study a language that has an inflected future tense.
What options are available?
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Is there a name for the tense some Romance languages used to use for stories?
I've seen it before, but I don't know what it would be called. I know that some of the Romance languages used to have a specific tense used only for stories (at least, fictional ones). They're no ...
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How did "will" lose the meaning "want" in English?
Will used to mean want (and sometimes still does) but in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Norwegian, the cognate still means want.
What was different about English to cause this?
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Are there languages with tense that lack a pluperfect?
This is something I've been thinking about. It would be rather hard to tell a story without using a pluperfect. I know there are languages that lack tense, like Chinese, but what about languages that ...
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How can the perfective aspect apply to the present tense?
The perfective aspect is makes it so that the verb is viewed "outside" the verb, while imperfective verbs have an internal view into the verb.
This makes sense for past tense verbs, in order to view ...
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