The Grammar of the English Tense System

The Grammar of the English Tense System
Author:
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 854
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110199882
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The Grammar of the English Tense System forms the first volume of a four-volume set, The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase. The other volumes, to appear over the next few years, will deal with mood and modality, aspect and voice. The book aims to provide a grammar of tense which can be used both as an advanced reference grammar (for example by MA-level or postgraduate students of English or linguistics) and as a scientific study which can act as a basis for and stimulus to further research. It provides not only a wealth of data but also a unique framework for the study of the English tense system, which achieves great predictive and explanatory power on the basis of a limited number of relatively simple rules. The framework provided allows for an analysis of the semantics of individual tenses which reflects the role of tenses not only in locating situations in time relative to speech time but also in relating situations in time relative to one another to form temporally coherent discourse. Attention is paid to the relations between tenses. On the one hand, we can identify sets of tenses linked to particular temporal areas such as the past or the future. These sets of tenses provide for the expression of a system of temporal relations in a stretch of discourse in which all the situations are located within the same temporal area. On the other hand, there are many contexts in which speakers might in theory choose between two or more tenses to locate a situation (e.g., when we choose between the past tense and the present perfect to locate a situation before speech time), and the book examines the difference that a choice of one or the other tense may make within a discourse context. The book moves from a detailed exploration of the meaning and use of individual tenses to a thorough analysis of the way in which tenses can be seen to function together as sets, and finally to a detailed examination of tenses in, and tenses interacting with, temporal adverbials. Original data is used frequently throughout the book to illustrate the theory discussed.

The English Tense System

The English Tense System
Author: Annabelle Jenkins
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2018-04-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781717548023
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The English Tense System consists of twelve tenses. This concise little book gives an overview of each one of them and how to use them in all persons in the affirmative, negative and interrogate. Ideal for learners of the English language.

The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide

The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide
Author: Phil Williams
Publisher: English Lessons Brighton
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2014-07-07
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1913468003
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Quickly discover the many uses of the English tenses. How do English speakers use two tenses to mean the same thing? Why do the rules not always apply? This bestselling grammar guide reveals all. Exploring the usage patterns of the 12 key tenses of the English language, this book covers all the rules and patterns for the past, present and future in simple, continuous and perfect forms. As well as seeing how to build the tenses, you'll learn how English speakers really use them. The English Tenses: Practical Grammar Guide is ideal as either an accompaniment to core texts or as a full self-study guide. It introduces the reader to flexible uses of the English tenses, with simple, easy-to-follow explanations, colourful examples and enlightening comparisons. To continue your journey towards mastering English grammar, get The English Tenses now.

A Comparatative Approach to the English Tense System

A Comparatative Approach to the English Tense System
Author: Marc Schubert
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 29
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3656092591
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Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,7, University of Hamburg, language: English, abstract: Robert Binnick (1991: vii) wrote "whoever has read in one book that English has three tenses, in another that it has two, and in yet a third that is has sixteen (...) may be pardoned for some confusion and some skepticism as to the claim of linguistic scholars to know a great deal about tense". This quotation illustrates the problem of the classification of the English tense system on which the focus of this paper will be based. Although linguists' knowledge of the tense system has increased over the years, the problem is that, as Robin Lakoff wrote, they "cannot account for many ways in which tenses are used in English" (Binnick 1991: vii). Therefore, English tense(s) have not yet been understood completely. By comparing different authors and frameworks, this paper will present different approaches to the English tense system. The aim is not to provide a perfect solution to all answers but to introduce different viewpoints and to go a step beyond the common conceptualization of the English language by presenting competing theories.

Tense

Tense
Author: Bernard Comrie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1985-06-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521281386
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Bernard Comrie introduces readers to the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world.

The English Tenses Exercise Book

The English Tenses Exercise Book
Author: Phil Williams
Publisher: English Lessons Brighton
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1913468070
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The English Tenses Exercise Book drills a solid understanding of the past, present and future in simple, continuous and perfect forms. With thousands of examples of each tense, practising both form and use, this is a perfect companion to reference books and language classes. Each tense is tested separately to help you perfect them, before being brought together in mixed tense exercises that compare and contrast use. Exercises include individual gap-fill sentences, scrambled sentences, reading for information, usage analysis, and error correction, as well as longer prose exercises that demonstrate applied grammar. You'll find educational articles, short stories and even a recipe for homemade bread! This wealth of practice will strengthen your understanding and your confidence, while also providing entertainment thanks to the author's uniquely engaging style. Written by Phil Williams, author of the bestselling reference book, The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide, this exercise book is a must-have for any student of English. Get it today!

English Tense and Aspect in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar

English Tense and Aspect in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar
Author: Carl Bache
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2008
Genre: English language
ISBN:
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This book is aimed at fellow practitioners and researchers in functional linguistics. It offers a friendly but critical appraisal of a major component of the 'standard' version of SFL, i.e. the account given by Halliday and Matthiessen of tense and aspect in English. Supporting his criticisms with evidence from a project in corpus linguistics, Bache suggests that this account fails in several ways to satisfy accepted functionalist criteria, and hence needs revising and extending. After surveying alternative functionalist approaches to modelling time and tense in English (including Fawcett's Cardiff school approach and Harder's instructional-semantic approach), and after presenting a number of principles of category description, Bache goes on to offer an alternative SFL account of this area of grammar. In Bache's model, the focus is on the speaker's communicative motivation for choosing particular verb forms. The relevant choice relations are seen to draw on metafunctionally diverse resources, such as tense, action, aspect and other domains. The basically univariate, serial structure of the verbal group is accordingly enriched with certain characteristics associated with multivariate structures, and the idea of recursion is abandoned. Bache finally examines the descriptive potential of his model in connection with projection, conditions, and narration.

Teaching Tenses

Teaching Tenses
Author: Rosemary Aitken
Publisher: Intrinsic Books Ltd
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0957271859
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This book is intended to help you, as a teacher of English as a Foreign language (E F L ), to teach common verb tenses and patterns more efficiently and clearly. Some of the material in the book may surprise you. To begin with, the explanations and commentary may seem self-evident, or the phonetic realisations may seem unnecessary. If this is so, please try to bear with me. The material in the book is designed to be of help to several groups: the experienced native speaker seeking a possible new approach to add to his armoury, the novice teacher, who speaks English with native speaker intuition, but has not yet fully analysed what it is that she does know, or why she says what she says, and also the non-native E F L teacher abroad, who speaks English excellently, and yet wishes to understand the subtler differences in usage and idiom which the native speaker takes for granted. Rosemary Aitken

English Grammar

English Grammar
Author: Talmy Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 381
Release: 1993
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027220999
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The approach to language and grammar that motivates this book is unabashedly functional; grammar is not just a system of empty rules, it is a means to an end, an instrument for constructing concise coherent communication. In grammar as in music, good expression rides on good form. Figuratively and literally, grammar like musical form must make sense. But for the instrument to serve its purpose, it must first exist; the rules must be real, they can be explicitly described and taught. This book is intended for both students and teachers, at college level, for both native and nonnative speakers. With the guidance of a teacher this book will serve as a thorough introduction to the grammar of English. Volume II continues with syntactic and communicative complexity: embedded clauses – verb complements, relative clauses; detransitive voice – passive, anti-passive, impersonal and middle voice, reflexive and reciprocal constructions; focus and topic constructions; nondeclarative speech acts. It closes with interclausal connectivity: conjoined and subordinate clauses, the grammar of discourse coherence, clause chains and thematic paragraphs.

Contiguity Theory

Contiguity Theory
Author: Norvin Richards
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2016-06-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262528827
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An argument that the word order of a given language is largely predictable from independently observable facts about its phonology and morphology. Languages differ in the types of overt movement they display. For example, some languages (including English) require subjects to move to a preverbal position, while others (including Italian) allow subjects to remain postverbal. In its current form, Minimalism offers no real answer to the question of why these different types of movements are distributed among languages as they are. In Contiguity Theory, Norvin Richards argues that there are universal conditions on morphology and phonology, particularly in how the prosodic structures of language can be built, and that these universal structures interact with language-specific properties of phonology and morphology. He argues that the grammar begins the construction of phonological structure earlier in the derivation than previously thought, and that the distribution of overt movement operations is largely determined by the grammar's efforts to construct this structure. Rather than appealing to diacritic features, the explanations will generally be rooted in observable phenomena. Richards posits a different kind of relation between syntax and morphology than is usually found in Minimalism. According to his Contiguity Theory, if we know, for example, what inflectional morphology is attached to the verb in a given language, and what the rules are for where stress is placed in the verb, then we will know where the verb goes in the sentence. Ultimately, the goal is to construct a theory in which a complete description of the phonology and morphology of a given language is also a description of its syntax.