Future Tense

Nature - Humans - Past - Future - Presence - Absence These familiar terms are the stepping stones of thought that went into my thesis work. While some may pair these words together as dichotomies, I concentrate on the balancing act that exists between them. Since the first Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-18th century, human activities have significantly altered the rest of the natural world. Other species have evolved in reaction to circumstances produced by human actions. Through my own observations of nature and research into how humans have impacted nature’s evolution, speculation began to swell as to what does the future look like? My thesis work presents found objects from human life intermingled with my own ceramic pieces that are inspired by nature but have elements of peculiarity. The relics represent a human existence and the ceramic components act as a symbol of other forms of life. These familiar, yet odd growth forms imply futurity, a continued existence. This futurity is stemming from a human element that is clearly from the past, combined with this altered view of nature. Are humans of the past too? Are these growths something of the future? At a fundamental level, the work I make as an artist is intended to imply that life will continue in some form, with or without us. My work evokes a glimpse of how things may evolve in the future in order to stress the importance of mindful consideration of how the decisions we make impact the environment

Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997)

Positional Effects on the Characterization of Ejectives in Waima’a

This paper presents results from an ongoing investigation into stop consonants in Waima’a, focusing on the issue of tense v. lax ejectives. Sources tend to describe ejectives in a given language as either tense or lax; however ejectives in Waima'a, do not fit squarely into either category [4]. Here we compare ejectives in word-initial and word-medial contexts, to specifically address the role of word-position in the tense/lax distinction. Results show that word-position affects the duration of all stop types analyzed, i.e. unaspirated, postaspirated, & ejective stops. Variability amongst the ejective tokens suggests that the notion of a tense/lax dichotomy should be replaced instead with that of a tense/lax continuum

An Annotation Scheme for Reichenbach's Verbal Tense Structure

In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in language. This allows for precise reasoning about tense in documents, and the deduction of temporal relations between the times and verbal events in a discourse. We define the syntax of RTMML, and demonstrate the markup in a range of situations

The origins of the Romance analytic passive : evidence from word order

This chapter argues that despite formal resemblances, Latin perfect tense BE-periphrases of the type amatus sum ‘I was loved’ are not the historical source of Romance present tense passives like Italian sono amato and French je suis aimé (both meaning ‘I am (being) loved’). Evidence comes from the observation that Late Latin has a very strong preference for the head-final order ‘past participle–BE’, which goes against the otherwise general tendency for the language to move towards a strictly head-initial TP. As an alternative, I propose that amatus sum perfects disappeared from the language, and that the analytic present tense passives are new formations. The Late Latin preference for head-final BE-periphrases is explained in terms of phonological weakening of the auxiliary. I conclude by comparing this phonological process to the oft-discussed grammaticalization of HAVE (habeo) as a marker of futurity.</p

What the Future ‘Might’ Brings

This paper concerns a puzzle about the interaction of epistemic modals and future tense. In cases of predictable forgetfulness, speakers cannot describe their future states of mind with epistemic modals under future tense, but promising theories of epistemic modals do not predict this. In §1, I outline the puzzle. In §2, I argue that it undermines a very general approach to epistemic modals that draws a tight connection between epistemic modality and evidence. In §3, I defend the assumption that tense can indeed scope over epistemic modals. In §4, I outline a new way of determining the domain of quantification of epistemic modals: epistemic modals quantify over the worlds compatible with the information accumulated within a certain interval. Information loss can change which interval is relevant for determining the domain. In §5, I defend the view from some objections. In §6, I explore the connections between my view of epistemic modality and circumstantial modality

On the processing of agreement morphology

The paper deals with the role played by morphology in core syntax within a generative minimalist framework: more specifically it deals with the theory of valuation of agreement or phi-features (that is, person and number features) and the valuation of tense or t-features (that is, features like [+/-present]), and there is a second part where I focus on the computation of both kinds of features according to the neuroimaging literature. The core idea that I aim to defend is that agreement features and tense features are each valued by a distinct head, namely 'v' and T. I argue that the number of steps in the 'real' processing or computation of agreement features and of tense feaures must be the same, irrespective of whether the morphological realization is 'zero' (as is frequently the case in a language like English) or not (as is typically the case in a Romance language like Spanish).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Processing of regular and irregular past tense morphology in highly proficient second language learners of English: a self-paced reading study

Dual-system models suggest that English past tense morphology involves two processing routes: rule application for regular verbs and memory retrieval for irregular verbs (Pinker, 1999). In second language (L2) processing research, Ullman (2001a) suggested that both verb types are retrieved from memory, but more recently Clahsen and Felser (2006) and Ullman (2004) argued that past tense rule application can be automatised with experience by L2 learners. To address this controversy, we tested highly proficient Greek-English learners with naturalistic or classroom L2 exposure compared to native English speakers in a self-paced reading task involving past tense forms embedded in plausible sentences. Our results suggest that, irrespective to the type of exposure, proficient L2 learners of extended L2 exposure apply rule-based processing

A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS' ERRORS IN ENGLISH WRITTING AT SMP 1 DUNGKEK SUMENEP IN ACADEMIC YEAR 2005 / 2006

The writer was interested in analyzing the errors made by the second year students of SMP 1 Dungkek, Sumenep because of two reasons : First, the students often make errors, when they wrote an essay, at although they had been given the topic before by the teacher. Second, they don’t know the kinds of errors. The purposes of the study were to find out the kinds of the errors in writing made by the students, and the most dominant errors in using simple past tense. This study has some significance for both the students and the teachers to increase learning and teaching English, especially in using the verb change of simple past tense.\ud This study used descriptive research design, and a population research involving 60 students. The research instrument of the study was a composition test given by teacher consisting of 13 items of simple past tense. To analyze the data, the writer took some steps, namely identifying and classifying the errors, and determining the frequency of occurrence by using percentage formula.\ud The result of the test shows that there were 500 errors in hand writing of simple past tense. More specifically, errors there were 23.8 % errors of omission, 50.4 % errors of addition, and 11.7 % errors of misformation, and no one made misordering errors. In other words, the dominant errors made by the students happened in addition errors.\u