Search results for "Past tense"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach
1997
Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensio…
Testo e aspetto: passato prossimo e passato remoto nei Confessionali siciliani antichi
2019
The Old Sicilian Confessionali are devotional texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with a very simple textual structure. In particular, two of them, to a large extent, are lists of questions aimed at investigating the sinner and his sins. Nevertheless they prove to be a useful field to define the values of the “passato prossimo” and the “passato remoto”. In the two texts, the two tenses have a clearly distinct distribution. The former has a perfective value, the latter has an aoristic value and, regardless of a temporal criterion, they occur according to this aspectual opposition.
A classroom intervention on Spanish grammar and writing: the use of the past tense with secondary school students / La intervención didáctica en el a…
2015
AbstractThis article presents an innovative experience which links grammar teaching with writing, following the premises of the Grammar Didactic Sequences (GDS) with one basic objective: to create a situation in which students learn to reflect on the language they use and are able to use these reflections to improve their writing. The GDS, focused on the use of past tense verb forms, was carried out with fourth-year secondary school students in Spain. This article highlights the difficulties experienced by students when using grammatical concepts as elements to control usage and the importance of revising texts in order to create metalinguistic awareness in a recursive didactic process: fro…
Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European
2009
This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with re…
Processing Past Tense in the left cerebellum
2014
We report the case of a patient with ischemic lesion of the left cerebellum, who showed specific deficits in processing past versus future tense of action verbs. These findings confirm, in the presence of cerebellar damage, previous results obtained with transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects and suggest a specificity of the left cerebellum for preparation of responses to the past tense of action verbs. As part of the procedural brain, the cerebellum could play a role in applying the linguistic rules for selection of morphemes typical of past and future tense formation.