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Relative Tense
Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time, the moment being considered in the context. In other words, the reference point (or center of deixis) is the moment of discourse or narration in the case of absolute tense, or a different moment in the case of relative tense. A further distinction has also been made between "strict relative" tense, which merely expresses time relative to the reference point, and "absolute-relative tense" (such as pluperfect), which expresses time relative to the reference point while also placing the reference point in time relative to the present moment.Comrie (1985), p. 64. A relative past tense is sometimes called an anterior tense, while a relative futu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Category
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include: * Case, varying according to function. * Gender, with values like male, female, animate, inanimate, neuter, and more general classes. * Number, varying according to the number of things. * Tense, varying according to when an action takes place, whether in the present, past or future. * Aspect, varying according to how much time an action will take, whether finished, repeated or habitual. * Mood, varying according to modality, or the speaker's attitude towards the action. Although the use of terms varies from author to author, a distinction should be made between grammatical categories and lexical categories. Lexical categories (considered syntactic categories) largely correspon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Non-past Tense
The nonpast tense (also spelled non-past) (abbreviated ) is a grammatical tense that distinguishes an action as taking place in times present or future. The nonpast tense contrasts with the past tense, which distinguishes an action as taking place prior to the moment of utterance. The nonpast tense is observed in many languages. Due to a lack of future tense inflectional morphology on the verb stem, many languages that are popularly conceived as having a three-way tense distinction (between past, present, and future The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ex ...), can in fact be understood as having a two-way past-nonpast tense distinction. For example, in English, future sentences often take present tense verb morphology, and do not contain specialized future tense verb morpho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joan Bybee
Joan Lea Bybee (previously: Hooper; born 11 February 1945 in New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, morphology, and phonology. Bybee is best known for proposing the theory of usage-based phonology and for her contributions to cognitive and historical linguistics. Contributions to linguistic theory Bybee's earliest work in linguistics was framed within a Generative perspective, the dominant theoretical approach to phonology at the time. As her career developed, Bybee's contributions moved progressively from formalist theories towards a functional and cognitive perspective, incorporating insights from morphology, semantics, syntax, child language acquisition and historical linguistics. Generative work (1970s) Natural Generative Phonology In the early and mid-70's, Bybee proposed that the connection between the abstract phonological re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uses Of English Verb Forms
Modern standard English has various verb forms, including: * Finite verb forms such as ''go'', ''goes'' and ''went'' * Nonfinite forms such as ''(to) go'', ''going'' and ''gone'' * Combinations of such forms with auxiliary verbs, such as ''was going'' and ''would have gone'' They can be used to express tense (time reference), aspect, mood, modality and voice, in various configurations. For details of how inflected forms of verbs are produced in English, see English verbs. For the grammatical structure of clauses, including word order, see English clause syntax. For non-standard or archaic forms, see individual dialect articles and thou. Inflected forms of verbs A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: *The base form or plain form (''go'', ''write'', ''climb''), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular *The ''-s'' form (''goes'', ''writes'', ''climbs''), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prospective Aspect
In linguistics, the prospective aspect ( abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect describing an event that occurs subsequent to a given reference time.Matthews, P. H. (1997) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. One way to view tenses in English and many other languages is as a combination of a reference time (past, present, or future) in which a situation takes place, and the time of a particular event relative to the reference time (before, at, or after). As an example, consider the following sentence: *When I got home yesterday, John called and said he would arrive soon. The verb ''would arrive'' expresses a combination of past reference time (the situation of my getting home, established as being in the past by the introductory clause) and an event (John's arrival) whose time of occurrence is subsequent to the reference time. Technically, this verb is said to be ''past tense, prospective aspect'', with the tense expressing the time of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfect Aspect
The perfect tense or aspect ( abbreviated or ) is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is ''I have made dinner.'' Although this gives information about a prior action (the speaker's making of the dinner), the focus is likely to be on the present consequences of that action (the fact that the dinner is now ready). The word ''perfect'' in this sense means "completed" (from Latin ''perfectum'', which is the perfect passive participle of the verb ''perficere'' "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated-verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of grammatical tense (such as time reference) and grammatical aspect. The Greek perfect tense is contrasted with the aorist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect). Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to but has continuing relevance at the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual disti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Klein (linguist)
Wolfgang Klein (born February 3, 1946) is a German linguist and a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He's known for his contributions in language acquisition, text analysis and studies on the semantics of time and space. Education and career Klein was born in Spiesen of Saarland. He attended elementary school there from 1952 to 1956 and the secondary school in Sulzbach from 1956 to 1965. Klein then studied German, Romance languages and philosophy at the Saarland University, where he received his doctorate in 1970. He then continued research at the Saarland University before moving to Heidelberg. After his habilitation in 1972 at the University of Heidelberg, he became an academic advisor and then a full professor at the same place from 1972 to 1976. From 1976 to 1980, Klein was a professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main. During this time, Klein also worked with Willem Levelt starting from 1977. In 1980, Willem Levelt and Klein co-f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverb
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as ''how'', ''in what way'', ''when'', ''where'', ''to what extent''. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by an individual adverb, by an adverbial phrase, or by an adverbial clause. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Modern linguists note that the term ''adverb'' has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.). Functions The English word ''adverb'' derives (through French) from Latin ''adverbium'', from ''ad-'' ('to'), ''verbum'' ('word', 'ver ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Modal Verbs
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms) and by their lack of the ending (''e'')''s'' for the third-person singular. The central English modal auxiliary verbs are ''can'' (with ''could''), ''may'' (with ''might''), ''shall'' (with ''should''), ''will'' (with ''would''), and ''must''. A few other verbs are usually also classed as modals: ''ought'', and (in certain uses) ''dare'', and ''need''. ''Use'' (, rhyming with "loose") is included as well. Other expressions, notably ''had better'', share some of their characteristics. Modal auxiliary verbs distinguished grammatically A list of what tend to be regarded as modal auxiliary verbs in Modern English, along with their inflected forms, is shown in the following table. Contractions are sho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Future-in-the-past
The future in the past is a grammatical tense In grammar, tense is a grammatical category, category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their grammatical conjugation, conjugation patterns. The main tenses found ... where the time reference is in the future with respect to a vantage point that is itself in the past. In English, future in the past is not always considered a separate tense, but rather as either a subcategory of future or past tense and is typically used in narrations of past events: ''John left for the front; he would not return until five years later.'' The reference point in the past is established by ''John left for the front'', and it is relative to that point that ''he would not return'' is in the future. The future in the past may also be commonly used for indirect speech (''She said she would return''), and it often has a modal aspect to its meaning. Besides English, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Future Perfect
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as ''will have finished'' in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect (grammar), perfect, a grammatical aspect that views an event as prior and completed. English In English, the future perfect construction consists of a future tense, future construction such as the auxiliary verb ''will'' (or shall and will, ''shall'') or the going-to future and the perfect infinitive of the main verb (which consists of the infinitive of the auxiliary verb ''have'' and the past participle of the main verb). This parallels the construction of the "normal" future verb forms combining the same first components with the plain infinitive (e.g. ''She will fall'' / ''She is going to fall''). For example: * She will have fallen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |