40
votes
Accepted
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. ...
- 60.2k
22
votes
Accepted
Do most languages have the same basic verb tenses?
Short answer: Not at all! Some languages only have two: past and non-past (English, Japanese). Others have past, present, and future (Ancient Greek). Still others have separate "recent" and "distant" ...
- 60.2k
16
votes
Accepted
Example of a tenseless sentence
A common saying in linguistics is, languages don't vary in what they can express. They only vary in what they must express.
In English, it's morphologically impossible to have a finite verb without ...
- 60.2k
15
votes
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 ...
- 17.3k
14
votes
Accepted
Does a difference of tense count as a difference of meaning in a minimal pair?
Yes. A minimal pair is meant to differ in one phoneme, to demonstrate that a speaker of the language can distinguish between the two words, and therefore that the contrast is phonemic. Since the ...
- 2,725
13
votes
Is there really a perfect tense?
Tense vs. aspect vs. mood
Let's first clarify what the different categories mean in the first place:
Tense is a category that locates events on a timeline. Distinctions between different tenses are ...
- 6,333
12
votes
Are there any known natural languages in which tense is never (or very rarely) expressed through the modification of verbs?
In Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, the verbs never change their form, it is the pronouns that have the tense. In Wolof there is I-which-is-now, I-that-will-be, I-that-was, ...
- 17.3k
11
votes
Accepted
Are there languages where the tense depends on time elapsed between events?
Having one or more remoteness distinctions in the past tense is reasonably common, particularly in Papua, parts of the Amazon and parts of Africa: http://wals.info/feature/66A (note that the map is ...
- 306
7
votes
Accepted
Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
The short answer: centuries of use of Old Church Slavonic instead of Latin or Romanian as a written language BUT note there is a tendency towards analytic tenses in spoken languages across Europe.
...
- 7,313
6
votes
Accepted
Why does French use “be” as the auxiliary for a few verbs?
As usual in language evolution, having two auxiliaries wasn't a goal, things just happened this way (and in fact the long-term evolution is towards a single auxiliary).
There is an article in French ...
6
votes
Which languages conflate (imperfective) past and irrealis, and why?
I suspect subjunctive merged with indicative in English simply due to phonetical reasons. Look at Old English:
"I ate" (indicative) - Ic æt
"I ate" (subjunctive) - Ic æte
or
"we beat" (...
6
votes
Suffix -ed indicating current state
"Based" here is either the past/passive participle of the verb base used in the passive construction "BE + past participle", or an adjective derived from the past participle (a departicipial adjective—...
- 17.3k
5
votes
Grammatical Aspect and Lexical Aspect
As luck would have it, I'm just preparing a talk on aspect at a conference. The problem, with your question is that you're looking at aspect in isolation.
Your sentence (as a sequence of words) is ...
- 10.6k
5
votes
Have the Spanish tenses stopped evolving?
Languages change, it's inevitable. Even an almost geographically isolated language will change: maybe in a limited way, or at a slower pace, but it will.
Some changes are more visible and happen in ...
- 9,230
5
votes
Accepted
How can the perfective aspect apply to the present tense?
In English, at least, the ordinary simple present is imperfective; but there are genres in which a perfective use is common.
In sports broadcasts, for instance: "He shoots, he scores!" describes an ...
- 1,470
5
votes
Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?
First, it is important to be clear on what "most basic form" as described above covers. One notion is "structurally simplest", that is, "having the fewest added things". The other is "phonologically ...
- 76.9k
5
votes
Example of a tenseless sentence
As Draconis explained quite clearly, English is a tense language, which requires finite verbs (in matrix clauses) to be gramatically tensed to specify its temporal conditions. And I'd like to talk ...
- 186
5
votes
Why does Spanish have obsolete tenses?
Because language changes gradually.
So for some features (in this case the mentioned Spanish tenses) there is first some alternative to express them, and this alternative becomes more frequent than ...
- 29.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Present perfect tense vs simple past
What the site is trying to explain is that both German and English have a simple past tense and a perfect tense and that in the not too distant past, they may have been used similarly. In spoken ...
- 797
4
votes
How verb tenses evolve
English and French pluperfect constructions are not descended from a common ancestor
The English pluperfect tense (along with all the other composite tenses made with "have") is not what is called "...
- 17.3k
4
votes
Are there any known natural languages in which tense is never (or very rarely) expressed through the modification of verbs?
Chinese is the one. Like many asian-oceaninc languages, it is a modal rather than tense language. Verbs in chinese do not change according to time of the action.
- 209
4
votes
Accepted
Lithuanian possessive perfect
It is basically pretty similar thing to English present perfect, i.e. the auxiliary verb have + some sort of past or passive participle of a content verb to express some sort of past.
But in many ...
- 2,333
4
votes
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 ...
- 23.4k
4
votes
The verb to have in relation to the past
The periphrastic 'have'-perfect isn't a feature common to the Indo-European languages, but rather one that's part of the Standard Average European Sprachbund, which developed as the various European ...
- 2,063
4
votes
The verb to have in relation to the past
This is a feature of Standard Average European (SAE), a Sprachbund across much of Europe. We know it's not an Indo-European genetic feature, since it's not generally found in Indo-European languages ...
- 60.2k
4
votes
Accepted
How did multiple European languages start using future tense to refer to the present?
Epistemic modality ("He will be in London now") and futurity ("He will see her tomorrow") are generally associated with each other. This seems to be fairly common cross-...
- 6,743
4
votes
Accepted
Argumentation for the existence of Tense phrase
The usual argument is that the present-tense marking only ever appears once in the phrase. If you put another verb before the main one, that one takes the tense marking instead:
John spends […]
John ...
- 60.2k
3
votes
"Please to be <VERB>ing" in Indian english
I wonder if this isn't best analyzed as a combination of two factors:
1) Different evolution of "please" construction -- Standard English has worn it down from something like "may it please you to {...
- 433
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