A Study Of The Tense Systems In English And Romanian

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Linguistic Typology and Language Universals, language: English, abstract: As Martin Haase points out, the term ‘tense’ in any given language can hardly be isolated. In a broader context, it usually consists of an interwoven system, the so-called Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM). English and Romanian are no exception. Haase states that “it is far from simple to attribute TAM-categories clearly to either tense, aspect or mood, since most categories contain a temporal as well as an aspectual or modal meaning.” (Haase, 1994:135). In order not to go beyond the intended scope of this analysis, I will thus straightforwardly compare English and Romanian past tenses, thereby avoiding a detailed discussion on the inner TAM workings of each language, as this could easily fill entire books on its own. Nonetheless, when absolutely necessary, I will include mood and aspect since both of them cannot be entirely ignored in an analysis about time-related utterances. My main concern, however, is to illustrate the general differences of the tense systems rather than to consider all the exceptions that follow in their wake. Thus, before explaining the construction of the main past tenses, I will provide a short overview and definition of the terms tense, aspect and mood in the English and Romanian language.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

This open access book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal reference and its linguistic expression, from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics approach. Verbal tenses, in general, and more specifically the categories of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal coherence of a discourse, as well as to the cognitive temporal coherence of the mental representations built in the language comprehension process. As such, it investigates the phenomenon of temporal reference at the interface between corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics and pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing and machine translation.

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.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.