The Simple Present Tense in English: A Unified Treatment

English Language and Linguistics, 2001

It is generally agreed that the English ‘present tense’ is not appropriately analyzed as indicating present time: present-time events often cannot be expressed in the present tense; conversely, the present tense is often used for nonpresent occurrences. I will argue, however, that these problems are only apparent, arising from a failure to appreciate the numerous conceptual factors that are crucially involved. When these are properly elucidated, using notions available in cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar, the characterization ‘coincidence with the time of speaking’ proves remarkably adequate in accounting for present-tense usage.

The Acquisition of the Present, 2015

The simple/progressive aspectual contrast is fundamental in present-based narratives in English: the simple present encodes temporally sequenced events whereas the progressive creates a close-up effect and introduces a perspective "from within", often associated with the subjective viewpoint of the narrator (Chuquet 1994). This dichotomy is, nonetheless, cancelled in certain types of oral narratives, such as the narrative commentaries, where the simple present has been shown to take over some of the functional-semantic scope of the progressive form (Williams 2002). On the basis of a corpus of 12 L1 English and 12 L2 English oral narratives elicited by means of a picture book, we show that the simple present is used as a default form in L1 English narratives, irrespective of the narrative function of the predicate or of its inherent semantic properties. In L2 English, the advanced French-speaking learners differ from the English native speakers in their choice of temporal linkage, which favors the use of the progressive form, and struggle to construct a cohesive temporal perspective in their stories. This indicates that discourse use of tense-aspect morphology remains a challenge for advanced learners, in part because it is informed by information selection patterns embedded in the learners' L1.

Tsukuba English Studies, 2013

2013

A vast majority of known languages have mechanisms which enable the speaker to express time (Comrie, 1985). Among these languages most of them also express time with a verb, and more specifically, with various verbal tenses (Smith, 1991). The verbal tense, a grammatical category which differs significantly from one language to another may also be considered a grammaticalization of time; in other words, chronological time is expressed with,

1974

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 2004

* I wish to thank Susan Reed for her very insightful comments on the first draft of this article. Of course, she is in no way responsible for any erroneous claims which the article might make.

Embedded tenses pose a challenge to any semantic theory of temporal discourse. In this paper I propose an intensional account of English embedded tenses. On the account that I will present, the semantic job of a tense is to specify a relation between a perspective time and the time at which an eventuality takes place. By default, the time of utterance is the perspective time that a tense takes as input. But a switch of perspective time can be triggered when a tense appears in certain grammatical environments. I suggest that intensional verbs and modals are triggers of perspective-time shifts.