Tense Flashcards
What information does tense give?
Indicates the time at which an event existed
Location in time
Time reference marked grammatically
What categories are used to express tense?
Lexical and functional
How is tense lexically expressed?
adverbs: tomorrow, later, then
PPs: in the morning, after the election
NPs: last year, the next day
How is tense functionally expressed?
Auxiliaries and particles: will, has, had
Verbal affixes: past tense -ed
What are the two most common morphological tense systems?
past and non past
future and non future
How does English distinguish tense?
3 way semantic distinction of tense
past -ed
non past: present and future (will)
Are all 3 tense distinctions always morphologically encoded?
it is unusual, but Lithuanian does so
Is tense only marked morphologically?
Some languages use past and nonpast with adverbs (tomorrow) to differentiate present and future
What is reference time?
The time of an utternce
How is situation time related to utterance time?
The time an event occurs with respect to when the utterance was made
Explain absolute tense
the time of reference is the time of the utterance
Explain relative tense
the time of reference is the time of some other event
