Grammatical Tense
A Grammatical Tense is a Grammatical Category that expresses time relative to the moment of speaking.
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Conditional Grammatical Mood, Natural Language Grammar, Grammatical Mood, Grammatical Aspect, Grammatical Polarity, Linguistics, Verb, Grammatical Conjugation, Tenseless Language, Cognitive Psicology.
References
2018
- (Wikipedia, 2018) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense Retrieved:2018-5-5.
- In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference with reference to the moment of speaking.[1] [2] Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
Basic tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like Chinese, though it can possess a future and nonfuture system, which is typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. [3] On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs. recent past, or near vs. remote future.
Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being spoken about). This is called relative (as opposed to absolute) tense. Some languages have different verb forms or constructions which manifest relative tense, such as pluperfect ("past-in-the-past") and “future-in-the-past”.
Expressions of tense are often closely connected with expressions of the category of aspect; sometimes what are traditionally called tenses (in languages such as Latin) may in modern analysis be regarded as combinations of tense with aspect. Verbs are also often conjugated for mood, and since in many cases the three categories are not manifested separately, some languages may be described in terms of a combined tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system.
- In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference with reference to the moment of speaking.[1] [2] Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
2004
- (Rice et al., 2004), ⇒ Rice, M. L., Tomblin, J. B., Hoffman, L., Richman, W. A., & Marquis, J. (2004). "Grammatical tense deficits in children with SLI and nonspecific language impairment: Relationships with nonverbal IQ over time" (PDF). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47(4), 816-834.
- ABSTRACT: The relationship between children's language acquisition and their nonverbal intelligence has a long tradition of scientific inquiry. Current attention focuses on the use of nonverbal IQ level as an exclusionary criterion in the definition of specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical tense deficits are known as a clinical marker of SLI, but the relationship with nonverbal intelligence below the normal range has not previously been systematically studied. This study documents the levels of grammatical tense acquisition (for third-person singular -s, regular and irregular past tense morphology) in a large, epidemiologically ascertained sample of kindergarten children that comprises 4 groups: 130 children with SLI, 100 children with nonspecific language impairments (NLI), 73 children with low cognitive levels but language within normal limits (LC), and 117 unaffected control children. The study also documents the longitudinal course of acquisition for the SLI and NLI children between the ages of 6 and 10 years. The LC group did not differ from the unaffected controls at kindergarten, showing a dissociation of nonverbal intelligence and grammatical tense marking, so that low levels of nonverbal intelligence did not necessarily yield low levels of grammatical tense. The NLI group's level of performance was lower than that of the SLI group and showed a greater delay in resolution of the overgeneralization phase of irregular past tense mastery, indicating qualitative differences in growth. Implications for clinical groupings for research and clinical purposes are discussed.
1968
- Paul Kiparsky. (1968). “Tense and Mood in Indo-European Syntax.” In: Foundations of Language, 4(1).
- ↑ Fabricius-Hansen, "Tense", in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., 2006
- ↑ Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6: "the semantic concept of time reference (absolute or relative), … may be grammaticalized in a language, i.e. a language may have a grammatical category that expresses time reference, in which case we say that the language has tenses. Some languages lack tense, i.e. do not have grammatical time reference, though probably all languages can lexicalize time reference, i.e. have temporal adverbials that locate situations in time."
- ↑ Nick Huang, "On syntactic tense in Mandarin Chinese" "Proceedings of the 27th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics", Los Angeles, 2015.