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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 fu ... [...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: * Tense, the placing of a verb in a time frame, which can take values such as present and past * Number, with values such as singular, plural, and sometimes dual, trial, paucal, uncountable or partitive, inclusive or exclusive * Gender, with values such as masculine, feminine and neuter * Noun classes, which are more general than just gender, and include additional classes like: animated, humane, plants, animals, things, and immaterial for concepts and verbal nouns/actions, sometimes as well shapes * Locative relations, which some languages would represent using grammatical cases or tenses, or by adding a possibly agglutinated lexeme such as a preposition, adjective, or particle. ... [...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, a grammatical aspect that views an event as prior and completed. English In English, the future perfect construction consists of a future construction such as the auxiliary verb ''will'' (or ''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 asleep by the time we get home. * I shall ha ... [...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 repr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Past Perfect
The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time in the past. Examples in English are: "we ''had'' arrived"; "they ''had'' written". The word derives from the Latin ''plus quam perfectum'', "more than perfect". The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed"; it contrasts with the "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states. In English grammar, the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a ''past perfect progressive'' (or ''past perfect continuous'') form: "had been writing". Meaning of the pluperfect The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense; in modern linguistic terminology it may ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Present Perfect
The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and perfect aspect that is used to express a past event that has present consequences. The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar to refer to forms like "I have finished". The forms are ''present'' because they use the present tense of the auxiliary verb ''have'', and ''perfect'' because they use that auxiliary in combination with the past participle of the main verb. (Other perfect constructions also exist, such as the past perfect: "I had eaten.") Analogous forms are found in some other languages, and they may also be described as present perfect; they often have other names such as the German ''Perfekt'', the French '' passé composé'' and the Italian ''passato prossimo''. They may also have different ranges of usage: in all three of the languages just mentioned, the forms in question serve as a general past tense, at least for completed actions. In English, completed actions in many c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uses Of English Verb Forms
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes: * 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'' The uses considered include expression of tense (time reference), aspect, mood and modality, 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 certain other particular topics, see the articles listed in the adjacent box. For non-standard dialect forms and antique forms, see individual dialect articles and the article, 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 a ... [...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 t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfect Aspect
The perfect tense or aspect (list of glossing abbreviations, 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 verbs, Latin and Ancient Greek verbs, Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect grammatical tense, tense is a particular, grammatical conjugation, conjugated-verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of grammatical tens ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively 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 distinctions; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverb
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as ''how'', ''in what way'', ''when'', ''where'', ''to what extent''. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by single words (adverbs) or by multi-word adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses. 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", "verb"), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Modal Verbs
The English modal verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality (properties such as possibility, obligation, etc.). They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participle or infinitive forms) and by their neutralizationQuirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Jan Svartvik, & Geoffrey Leech. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. (that they do not take the ending ''-(e)s'' in the third-person singular). The principal English modal verbs are ''can'', ''could'', ''may'', ''might'', ''shall'', ''should'', ''will'', ''would'', and ''must''. Certain other verbs are sometimes classed as modals; these include ''ought'', ''had better'', and (in certain uses) ''dare'' and ''need''. Verbs which share only some of the characteristics of the principal modals are sometimes called "quasi-modals", "semi-modals", or "pseudo-modals". Modal verbs and their features The verbs customarily classed as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Future-in-the-past
The future in the past is a grammatical tense 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 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 future in the past is also found in Bulgarian and a number of other languages. Future perfect in the past A related, and more complex, tense is the future perfect in the past, which is also known as the ''conditional perfect''. Here, an event is situated b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |