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Copyright of Arts for Linguistic & Literary Studies is the property of Thamar University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several occasions. We build on these historical observations with an experimental study and a corpus study on a synchronic Dutch alternation, where avoidance of homophony between present and past tense can appear. Plurals of verbs with a stem ending in a dental show homophony with the present when they are used in the preterite (compare zetten 'put' pst - pl with zetten 'put' prs - pl). This homophony can be avoided by using the perfectum (hebben gezet 'have put'). A wug-style experiment shows that verbs with dental stem are indeed used significantly more in the perfectum in the plural than in the singular, while verbs without dental stem do not show this difference. A corpus study on Dutch further corroborates these results. Combined, these studies make a strong case for homophony avoidance as a plausible mechanism of language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different linguistic classifications of Spanish and Slovak make the differences between these two languages. The genetic criterion classifies languages, clustering them into language families, the largest among which is the Indoeuropean one. The typological criterion divides languages according to their grammatical structures. Meanwhile, Slovak is genetically a Slavonic language, and Spanish is a Romance language. Therefore, they both belong to different language families. Also, according to the typological criterion, Slovak is a synthetic language, and Spanish is an analytic language. Based on a theoretical study of the standard features and differences between the Slovak and Spanish verb systems, we formulated the hypotheses about language interferences, which are accepted or rejected at the end of the research. The current research aims to examine the errors in the use of past tenses by Slovak university students who study Spanish as a foreign language, and then analyze where these errors are due to interference with their native language. The present paper observes what errors students make in using past tenses in Spanish. The research question is: What interferences do Slovak learners of the Spanish language experience in the use of past tenses? We applied scientific methods (an observation, a textual analysis, a synthesis) to conduct the study. The first method was an observation. Applying this method made it possible to gather data by watching the process of doing grammatical exercises in Spanish during classes held from September 2020 to May 2022 for the first- and second-year students at the Faculty of Applied Languages of the University of Economics in Bratislava. These students knew English and were generally better at it than Spanish. We also conducted a textual analysis that primarily looked at the learners’ short-text writing skills. We used a form with 30 phrases the respondents needed to complete using past tenses. Then, we assessed the written and spoken communication skills of students. The analysis results show that, on the one hand, most respondents needed help distinguishing between the past continuous and simple past tenses, resulting in misuse. On the other hand, we found some slight errors in phrases in which the present perfect tense was supposed to be used.

ABSTRACT: This analysis continues the examination of the acknowledgement of dialectal variation in L2 Spanish textbooks initiated by Hernández Cubo (2019) and compares its findings with those from that previous study by focusing on the same linguistic aspect: the difference in the uses and semantic scopes of two past tenses – Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto and Pretérito Indefinido – in the Peninsular and Hispanic American macro-varieties. As the study by Hernández Cubo (2019) only examines textbooks produced in Spain, this investigation proposes a cross-regional comparison by evaluating materials from other world regions. Therefore, this research contributes to the investigation of language variation in L2 Spanish instruction by proposing a cross-regional analysis, which shows that the recognition of dialectal diversity within the uses of the aforementioned tenses is not a priority among textbook authors. Works from the USA, France, Germany and Italy present certain levels of dialectal acknowledgement, while the ones from Brazil and the UK constitute the most significantly dialectally sensitive materials regarding the treatment of Spanish past tenses.

Copyright of Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Kształcenie Polonistyczne Cudzoziemców is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This analysis continues the examination of the acknowledgement of dialectal variation in L2 Spanish textbooks initiated by Hernández Cubo (2019) and compares its findings with those from that previous study by focusing on the same linguistic aspect: the difference in the uses and semantic scopes of two past tenses - Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto and Pretérito Indefinido - in the Peninsular and Hispanic American macro-varieties. As the study by Hernández Cubo (2019) only examines textbooks produced in Spain, this investigation proposes a cross-regional comparison by evaluating materials from other world regions. Therefore, this research contributes to the investigation of language variation in L2 Spanish instruction by proposing a cross-regional analysis, which shows that the recognition of dialectal diversity within the uses of the aforementioned tenses is not a priority among textbook authors. Works from the USA, France, Germany and Italy present certain levels of dialectal acknowledgement, while the ones from Brazil and the UK constitute the most significantly dialectally sensitive materials regarding the treatment of Spanish past tenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verb is one of the main categories in grammar and it is an important language tool that organizes and controls sentences. Verb tenses always come in the service of the predicate of a sentence and are widely used in the language. In particular, the means of indicating the origin of the movement that took place in the period before the speech are different in the Turkmen language. From the time a nation and its language were formed, the following special language devices were found to denote the status and action of the verb: Progressive or non-progressive; definite or indefinite; the action experienced by the speaker or the action heard by the speaker.The past tense form of the verb in the Turkic languages is one of the most important and complex categories of grammar. Its scientific study dates back to the Middle Ages. The work of the Turkologists on this subject is mainly concerned with the development and use of various problems of the past forms of the verb in the historical and modern Turkic languages.

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The previous literature established the set of 'perfect' readings, including experiential/existential, resultative, recent past, hot news, the Present Perfect Puzzle, the lifetime effect, and the lack of narrative progression. On the other hand, it has been noted that the present perfect in some languages other than English, as well as similar tense/aspect constructions in other languages, falls into the category of a 'general-purpose past perfective', namely a tense-aspect constructionsharing some properties with the English present perfect while not being subject to constraints such as the lifetime effect and the Present Perfect Puzzle. In this paper, I propose that the general-purpose past perfectives are presuppositionally neutral tense/aspect constructions that allow the standard past perfective reading. If a language has presuppositionally stronger alternatives for the past perfective (presupposing anaphoricity, uniqueness, etc.), by the Presupposed Ignorance Principle (PIP), the presuppositionally neutral past perfective form will be felicitous only if the presuppositionally stronger alternatives cannot be used. Otherwise, the presuppositionally neutral past perfective will behave like a general-purpose past perfective in the above sense. I argue that this competition is the source of many of the perfect readings observed. I further argue that the cross-linguistic variation in this respect follows from the available alternatives languages have. I illustrate this idea with three groups of languages: (i) English; (ii) French, German, Italian; and (iii) Mandarin Chinese, each illustrating a different set of alternatives available, in both the temporal and aspectual domains. This analysis allows me to decompose various perfect readings that come from different sources and make better predictions regarding which of these readings a tense/aspect construction in a given language has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the practice of the participation agreement concluded by French speakers and writers in Benin and highlights the linguistic strategies they deploy to overcome the related difficulties. The analysis of the data made it possible to establish two scales of difficulties: first, there are difficulties related to the agreements of the past participle used as a qualifying adjective and second, there are also difficulties related to the agreements of the past participle used with the auxiliary have. To avoid the difficulties associated with the two scales, Beninese speakers and writers systematically substitute the past participle with the use of the compound past tense and the infinitisation of the verb that should be in the past. The two scales of difficulties identified can be correlated with the very structures of the mother tongues of the invited speakers-scriptors: the absence of systematic gender expression and the absence of conjugation time as in French, most of these languages being aspectual. A didactic perspective of the palliative strategies of the difficulties inherent in the agreement of the past participle in the French-speaking context of sub-Saharan Africa must be considered.

This study aims to go one step forward in understanding the influence the first foreign language has on the second foreign language learned by the same person. It investigates the influence of English on learning the past tenses of verbs in German in a group of second-term undergraduate students of German at the University of São Paulo who already had some experience of studying English. Data collection took place by administering a questionnaire and test of the English skills of the participants, followed by three other written activities, all executed in the classroom. A first quantitative analysis focused both on the informants’ knowledge level of the verb forms of the past in English and on their successes and failures in activities containing verb forms of the past in German. The qualitative analysis of some selected participants’ performance showed that the best performance in all activities was obtained by the informant who, despite previous experience of studying English, had no solid knowledge of the language. However, the informants with an intermediate level of English knowledge obtained quite different results, which revealed the importance of not generalizing about German learners with English language skills as if they were all the same standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammar learning in the class is not delivered attractively so that it can cause students to have low enthusiasm for learning. Besides, monotonous learning makes students easily get bored. After understanding the importance of grammar in learning English, it is needed to have learning media that can solve students' problems in class. Researchers offer instructional media in the form of authentic material that is a movie segment to be applied in learning grammar. The purpose of this research is to find out how the movie segment can improve the grammar mastery of fourth-semester students. The use of authentic material in the classroom can create a pleasant atmosphere because it can reduce anxiety levels and provide examples of English applications in the real world. Movie Segment is one type of authentic material in the form of video clips that are used to teach grammar. It is also equipped with worksheets, exercises, and answer keys so that it can facilitate the teacher to use the appropriate material and create a pleasant atmosphere in the classroom. The research design used is Classroom Action Research. Meanwhile, The criterion for success in this study is 75% of students achieve 75 in learning Grammar (Simple Past tense). The results of this study indicate that the mean value on the pre-test was 65.2 and the average value of the post-test in cycle 1 increased to 72.8. Then, the post-test mean score in cycle 2 increased to 78.8. The percentage of students who reached above or equal to KKM is 75 increased from 32% to 60% in cycle 1 and 80% in cycle 2. Therefore, this study proves that the use of movie segments can improve grammar understanding and can be used as one of alternative techniques in teaching grammar (past tense).

The previous literature established the set of ‘perfect’ readings, including experiential/existential, resultative, recent past, hot news, the Present Perfect Puzzle, the lifetime effect, and the lack of narrative progression. On the other hand, it has been noted that the present perfect in some languages other than English, as well as similar tense/aspect constructions in other languages, falls into the category of a ‘general-purpose past perfective’, namely a tense-aspect constructionsharing some properties with the English present perfect while not being subject to constraints such as the lifetime effect and the Present Perfect Puzzle. In this paper, I propose that the general-purpose past perfectives are presuppositionally neutral tense/aspect constructions that allow the standard past perfective reading. If a language has presuppositionally stronger alternatives for the past perfective (presupposing anaphoricity, uniqueness, etc.), by the Presupposed Ignorance Principle (PIP), the presuppositionally neutral past perfective form will be felicitous only if the presuppositionally stronger alternatives cannot be used. Otherwise, the presuppositionally neutral past perfective will behave like a general-purpose past perfective in the above sense. I argue that this competition is the source of many of the perfect readings observed. I further argue that the cross-linguistic variation in this respect follows from the available alternatives languages have. I illustrate this idea with three groups of languages: (i) English; (ii) French, German, Italian; and (iii) Mandarin Chinese, each illustrating a different set of alternatives available, in both the temporal and aspectual domains. This analysis allows me to decompose various perfect readings that come from different sources and make better predictions regarding which of these readings a tense/aspect construction in a given language has.

The continuous co-existence in Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) of the past tense alongside already, an aspect marker expressing iamitive functions (Olsson 2013), has not, to present knowledge, received an adequate explanation in terms of diachronic change. The two forms are often seen to overlap in function, but a more intensive survey reveals that only the completive functions overlap, the non-completive functions accounting for the majority of uses in present-day Singapore English. The bias in functions is considered to be the result of a renovation in contact grammaticalization, or a convergence towards the lexifier, often expressed in terms of decreolization in creole languages. The present study considers quantitative data of both completive and non-completive already across four diachronic time periods, concluding that the constant diglossic presence of the standard lexifier since colonization contributed to the convergence shown.

The present study investigates the semantics of a verbal suffix, the reduplicated vowel (-V) in Akan, while also addressing the role of tense and aspect (TA) markers in the morphological structure of the Akan verb. The verbal suffix (-V) has been analyzed as an aspectual marker by some but as a past tense by others. Based on data from native speaker's judgements and corpora, three observations are made in the present study: (i) the verbal suffix (-V) encodes a reference time (R) that is anterior to the speech time (S), (ii) the verbal suffix (-V) can be used in conditional and counterfactual sentences which have a reference time that coincides with speech time (R,S) or follows it (S_R), (iii) the completive meaning associated with events marked by (-V) is not asserted but a pragmatic interpretation that is associated with past tense in general. The study shows that the fact that the verbal suffix (-V) does not occur with the progressive and perfect aspects does not count as evidence against its status as past tense. Rather, in Akan, there is a general prohibition of overt marking of tense and aspect in a single clause, such that each verb is inflected for either tense or aspect, not both, in the clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the use of Audacity software to improve the pronunciation of regular verbs in the past tense. The participants were 30 advanced English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students of the English major of Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), Ecuador. A mixed-method approach was used to gather qualitative and quantitative data from the participants by means of surveys, tests and audio recordings through Audacity. The intervention process took eight weeks. During this time, students were first instructed on the use of Audacity. Then they were taught the three pronunciation rules of regular verbs in the past tense and were asked to record a total of 10 audios per student in isolation and in context. Three-hundred audios were analyzed in total. After analyzing the data, the results indicate that Audacity is an effective tool that not only improves learners' pronunciation, but also favors the practice of English language in a free and relaxed environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes verb tenses which primarily refer to past actions in the vernacular of the Sirinić Župa in the northern part of the Šar Mountains. The authors ascertain the inventory of forms which make up the preterite system of this vernacular, the syntactic and semantic conditions of their use, stylistic potential of each unit and the linguistic circumstances that make (im)possible their combining or interchangeability at the sentence level or within more extensive narrative sections. It turned out that the perfect has the most stable position - it is the most frequent form with the widest domain of use, while the aorist is the basic form which denotes actions experienced in the past stated by perfective verbs, and its place within the system is relatively stable. The past tense is most commonly used in stylistically neutral narration which involves zero emotional engagement, while the information about experiencing the action (or its lack) is usually absent from the narrative level or is part of the broader context, since it is not one of the primary perfective forms. When composing the narration, i.e. when recounting more complex events, the past tense is not normally used autonomously; it is combined with other forms of more specified semantics (aorist, imperfect, narrative imperative, future or present in the past). The role of the past tense in these contexts is to localize actions in time and to prepare for their introduction, while other forms give information on whether the effect of the action was experienced (aorist, imperfect), on whether the action was repetitive in the past (imperative, future), and the like. The imperfect is characterized by a much narrower use, while its syntactic and semantic potential is limited, which points to the fact that the process of its elimination is well under way, while the pluperfect has almost disappeared from the system. [roject of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 178020: Dijalektološka istraživanja srpskog jezičkog prostora]

The purpose of this study was to validate a procedure for sufficient exemplar training that can potentially lead to generalized responding. Based on this procedure, we taught four children with autism, generalized use of regular past tense verbs. We applied a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across the participants. The dependent variable was the number of verbs that needed to be trained for generalization to untrained verbs to occur. The number of verbs that needed to be trained varied considerably across participants as did the number of trials. We concluded that the procedure was validated and that it was easy to implement and it allows for individualization. We discuss the practical implications of our findings for teaching a wide range of skills using the same type of training procedure and data display strategies we provided in this study.

This study explores the differential effect of two types of corrective feedback strategies - explicit and implicit - on the acquisition and retention of correct past form of irregular verbs by Iranian English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Sixty out of 80 pre-intermediate EFL learners were selected as the participants, based on their performance on Key English Test (KET); their scores were between one standard deviation (SD) above and below the mean (M). Thereafter, they were randomly assigned into two experimental groups: the explicit group (N = 30) who received explicit corrective feedback and the implicit group (N = 30), who received implicit feedback. Results indicate that the explicit group outperformed the implicit group on the immediate and delayed post-tests. The findings of this study have theoretical and pedagogical implications for teachers. Feedback strategy provides teachers with information on effective teaching and student comprehension, and encourages them to use technology in a way that reduces anxiety and facilitates social learning.

N deshita/datta, which is the past-tense form of n desu/da, has not been explored in depth in studies of Japanese Linguistics. The present study examines a large corpus, and explores the cases of n deshita/datta used for past events and situations. The findings of the present study show that out of the 167 cases of n deshita/datta used for past events and situations in the corpus, 63 cases (37.7%) co-occurred with grammatical elements that require past-tense connections for the preceding item such as the sentential ending particle kke, the tara structure, and the tari structure. For the cases of n deshita/datta that co-occurred with kke, tara, or tari, it was concluded that the grammatical restrictions arising from these elements triggered the occurrences of n deshita/datta. On the other hand, 104 cases (62.3%) occurred without any grammatical elements that require past-tense connections. These cases of n deshita/datta in the corpus were used to express the speaker’s recollection of previously held knowledge, or as part of confirmation seeking utterances for previously held knowledge.

Copyright of Juznoslovenski Filolog is the property of Serbian Academy of Sciences & Arts, Institute for the Serbian Language and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this research is to describe the third semester agriculture students' ability to write simple sentences using simple past tense at Taman Siswa University Padang. This research was limited in three sentence forms; affirmative, negative and interrogative. Descriptive research was used in this study where the population was the third semester agriculture students at Taman Siswa University of Padang. The total number of the sample was 63 students. The finding showed that the ability of the third semester agriculture students of Taman Siswa University of Padang to write simple sentences using simple past tense was moderate. It could be seen that 70.97% students have moderate ability. In detail the percentages of each of form sentence were; 64.52% have moderate ability to write simple sentences in simple past tense of (verbal) affirmative, 74.20% have moderate ability to write simple sentences in simple past tense of (verbal) negative sentences, and 77.42% have moderate ability to write simple sentences in simple past tense of (verbal) interrogative sentences. Based on the research finding, it is suggested to the teachers to give more explanation about past tense and explain the usage of mechanics. The students are suggested to learn more about past tense and use mechanics correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]