40
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
Does English really have only two tenses.
It depends how you define "tense", but to most linguists, yes.
All languages can mark the time when an event occurs, to any degree of specificity you want. ...
- 69.6k
15
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
The argument that the English "will + infinitive" construction should not be considered a future tense is fairly complex. It is not an obvious matter, and I think the rejection of this classification ...
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15
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Are there any languages which inflect the noun for morphosyntactic categories normally reserved for verbs (e.g. tense, aspect, etc.)?
Here is a relevant Wikipedia article: Nominal TAM
There is a fair amount of literature that mentions the existence of languages that mark tense on nouns; the first result I found on Google was this ...
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15
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Why is tense obligatory in some languages and not in others?
Ultimately we can't answer why one language grammaticalises tense and why another language doesn't.
But what we can say is that all languages have at least one major verbal grammatical category. Tense ...
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12
votes
Why is tense obligatory in some languages and not in others?
All human languages allow the expression of distinctions in time reference, so there's always a way to describe the situation that one event precedes another. Some languages do this with special ...
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5
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Accepted
What is the name for the tense/mood/aspect of "You will have seen the news that..."?
Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 209-210) address this matter directly. They argue that, contrary to what one finds in traditional grammars, there are only two tenses in English, past and present/future. ...
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5
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Are there any languages which inflect the noun for morphosyntactic categories normally reserved for verbs (e.g. tense, aspect, etc.)?
In Japanese it is possible (and very usual) to conjugate adjectives to the past tense.
For example, to say something like "Tanaka was strong", the construction has the form: "As for Tanaka, [strong-...
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
There is an argument for distinguishing morphological tenses from periphrastic tenses. The English verb “to be” has five morphological tenses:
present: I am
past: I was
present subjunctive: (if) I ...
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4
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Do other languages have an "irreversible aspect"?
I have not heard of such a thing, but I have heard of similar things in other Bantu languages. Generally, when you investigate the pragmatics and semantics of a Bantu language's tense system, you will ...
- 83.4k
3
votes
Accepted
some basic questions about morphological aspect
Part of the difficulty in discussing aspect in English is that English is a tense-prominent language rather than an aspect-prominent language. So the main (and obligatory) grammatical marker on ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Derivation of Morpheme for "Raising" in NACLO Problem
This is not an easy task, if that’s all the data and information about Cupeño you’re given. Some things you can work out, but others do not seem possible to extract from just those data. As far as I ...
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3
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
It depends on what you mean by "tense". One thing that goes into making a "tense" is time reference, so the English future qualifies on that basis. The other thing, though, is "grammaticalization", ...
- 83.4k
2
votes
How to break down sentences into known grammatical categories
(One thing to note first, these terms aren't universally accepted. Linguists like to come up with new terms, and some people might use "imperfective" or "continuous" where I use "progressive", or "...
- 69.6k
1
vote
How do we characterize the thematic relations between verbs and subordinate phrases (clauses?) in languages without explicit case marking (eg English)
"Case" refers specifically to morphological systems, so it would be very confusing to use that term for languages which don't have such a system.
Thematic relations/roles are the semantic ...
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Having a hard time distinguishing between the simple and perfective aspects
There are two ways to interpret your question. One is about the semantic properties of two contrastive constructions in English which you give examples of, perhaps with an interest in what terms ...
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1
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Phase and aspect
From a Mandarin Chinese perspective:
The 'complements' 补语 bǔyǔ can be distinguished from the 'particles' 助词 zhùcí in the linguistics of (Mandarin) Chinese, of which aspect particles 动态助词 dòngtài zhùcí ...
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How would you classify a verb that denotes a close temporal relation to another verb?
I am not sure this answer responds to your question, but attempting an answer seemed better than prolonging a question-and-answer dialog through the comments.
The closest parallel I can think of to ...
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1
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Is have+ negation equal to imperfective?
In English, there are only 2 aspects: continuous (I'm reading, I wasn't reading, I have been reading, the book is being read) and non-continuous a.k.a. simple (I read, I didn't read, I have read it, I ...
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