Active participles in Jordanian Arabic

In this paper we analyze a new kind of participle formation in Brazilian Portuguese, which we have called innovative participles . This type of participle, which is getting more and more common for speakers of this language, takes place in contexts where only the canonical regular forms were expected, freely alternating with such forms. Our main aims are to determine the structure associated with innovative participles and to understand what mechanism of Brazilian Portuguese grammar makes the variation between regular and innovative participles possible. Assuming a Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993) approach to grammar, we propose that the same syntactic structure underlies the formation of both types of participles and the difference between them is the result of different morphological processes that occur at the level of Morphological Structure.

Mediaeval Spanish texts display a range of constructions which are formed by a present, past or future tense of the verb haber and the past participle of a transitive verb. In these constructions the direct object may precede or follow the participle; the participle sometimes agrees with the object, sometimes not: las batallas (que) ha vencidas/vencido, ha vencidas/vencido las batallas. During the thirteenth century an alternative type—tener +past participle—begins to appear with increasing frequency; it regularly indicates a state and, where tener is used, it is standard practice for past participle and direct object to agree: la tienen cercada, los tenie atributados. It is generally accepted that agreement is particularly favoured in the north-eastern dialects of the peninsula, but to the best of my knowledge no systematic attempt has been made to account for the syntactical, historical or geographical factors which affect past participle agreement in Old Spanish.

The article provides a methodological discussion on the definition of linguistic structures in interlanguage. Data come from an Eritrean learner observed during the first months of exposure to Italian as a second language. Previous re- search identified some developmental sequences for the acquisition of verb morphology, but it is not always clear how metalinguistic terms used in such sequences (e.g. 'present tense', 'past participle') should be interpreted. The article dis- cusses the issue in depth, by providing several explicit definitions for some of the structures involved in the sequence, no- tably present tense, person marking, past participle and present perfect. Results show that different definitions of the inter- language structures may lead to different acquisition orders. These findings suggest that the formulation of developmental sequences should be based on clear, explicit definitions both of the acquisition criteria and of the structures investigated.

Together with the use of double negatives, the use of non‐standard verb forms is generally stigmatised in all varieties of English, including Australian English. But although we all know, for example, that some speakers use done for the past tense of do, or went for the past participle of go, we have little systematic knowledge regarding the nature or extent of this variation. Shnukal's (1978) study of Cessnock English is the only Australian study which attempts to quantify the occurrence of non‐standard past tense and past participle verb forms, or to explore systematically the linguistic and non‐linguistic factors which influence this variation, while Cheshire (1982) provides an investigation of variation in present tense verb forms in Reading English. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining the variation in the lexical verb apparent in the speech of Inner‐Sydney adolescents. The focus of this paper will be on variation in irregular past tense and past participle forms. Two main quest...

This study was concerned with the reading comprehension of speakers of Black English Vernacular (BEV). Third, sixth, and ninth graders were rated as BEV or Standard English (SE) speakers using a sentence repetition task. They were then asked to complete passages which had been clozed for content words and verbs in the past and present tenses. This task used a multiple-choice format: Verb distractors were other forms of the clozed verb; content word distractors were words that were anomalous in that context. In a second task, subjects supplied time adverbials for 15 short paragraphs written in the past, present, or future tenses. On the cloze task, BEV speakers had significantly more errors for verbs than for content words compared to SE speakers. They also had significantly more errors in selecting the appropriate time adverbial on the basis of tense. These findings can be attributed to differences that exist in the verbal systems of SE and BEV.

RULES AND SCHEMAS IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF THE ENGLISH PAST TENSE Joan L. BybeeDan I. Slobin State University of New York,University of California, BuffaloBerkeley Consistent error patterns in English past-tense forms are reported for three age groups: preschoolers, 8-10-year-olds, and adults. It is argued that, although irregular forms are rote-learned, speakers make generalizations about such forms. Such a generalization is defined as a schema which describes general phonological properties of a morphological class, and is used in organizing and accessing the lexicon. Schemas for the English past tense develop and change with age, yielding implications for both acquisitional and diachronic theory.* 1. English verbal morphology is rather restricted, compared to that of a fullfledged inflectional language, since it offers only four inflectional morphemes: the 3rd singular present, the past tense, the past participle, and the progressive. Thus it provides no opportunity to study the complex interaction between intersecting inflectional categories within a paradigm, such as person, number, mood, and tense. It does, however, provide the opportunity for a study of a different sort: although English has a demonstrably productive process of suffixation for past-tense formation, in the form of -ed, it also has many irregular verbs whose past tense is formed in some cases without suffixation, and in others with changes of vowel (or, less commonly, consonant) in the stem. These irregular verbs are relatively few in number. Bloch 1947 identifies about 200 (several of which are archaic), but thousands of verbs form their past tense by adding an allomorph of -ed. Although irregular verbs are relatively insignificant as to type frequency, the picture is quite different when token frequency is considered: these are among the most frequent verbs of the language . Of the 30 most frequent past-tense forms (Kucera & Francis 1967), 22 are irregular. The situation changes radically in the second 30 most frequent past-tense forms, where 8 are irregular. From the child learner's point of view, irregular verbs are also prominent: Slobin 1971 finds that, in 49 hours of adult speech to Roger Brown's subject Eve, between the ages of 18 and 26 months, irregular past-tense forms account for 292 of the past-tense tokens, while regular verbs comprise only 99. Thus irregular past-tense forms constitute an important core of English verbal morphology. * A number of people contributed to the research reported here, and we would like to thank them for their help. Susan Ervin-Tripp, Roger Brown, and Zell Greenberg made their spontaneous speech data available to us; Zell Greenberg tested the preschool children and analysed the results; Amy Strage and Ann Eisenberg tested the adults; Mr. B. Harris and his third-grade class at Cornell Elementary School, Albany, CA, played the 'verb game' with us; Tanya Renner, Carol Lynn Moder, and BongHee Choi helped with the statistics; and Brody Hooper let us use his verb forms and his friends. While this research was being conducted, loan Bybee held a Postdoctoral Research Training Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. This research was also supported by the University of California Committee on Research and the Institute of Human Learning, University of California, Berkeley. 265 266LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) The difficulty presented by these irregular verbs, both for the learner and for the linguist, is that so many different irregularities occur. Though most irregulars are characterized by a vowel change, a number of different changes occur, e.g. stick/stuck, sing/sang, keep/kept, grow/grew. In addition, some verbs add a t or d; and some have consonant changes as well, e.g. makelmade. Jespersen 1942 lists ten classes of irregular past-tense formations, and dozens of sub-classes, while Bloch comes up with twenty conjugation types. Such variety increases the difficulty of the learning task, but at the same time provides us with an opportunity to investigate the interaction of rule and rote-learning in morphology. It is clear that some rote-learning is necessary in acquiring irregular past-tense forms: the pair go/went could not be learned in any other way. What is not so clear is whether speakers must learn all irregulars by rote, or whether...

This paper aims to discuss some issues in the diachrony of the periphrasis ‘Be + present participle’, as a means of denoting aspectual meanings in Greek and Old English. After a brief presentation of the data and an outline of their history, I present the typological assumptions that frequently explain how these types of constructions develop through time, as well as the problems they present. I argue that the actual historical data may not readily fit to a single neat path of evolution, but, rather, more than one explanatory parameter should be taken into consideration.

The large majority of the Slavic languages have in historical times lost the synthetic past tenses of the aorist and the imperfect. These tenses were replaced by a new past tense based on the erstwhile perfect. This transformation created space for new ways of forming a past tense, and one of these was a novel past tense based on the past active participle, also called the gerundial past tense, a past tense found in Northwest Russia, above all in the Pskov area, cf. Pskov dialectal i jon pom'orši toper’ uže, versus Standard Russia i on teper’ uže umer, ‘and he died now already’. The point of this article is to demonstrate how the emergence of the l-participle as the general past tense opened up for a reanalysis of the past active participle as a finite past tense verb-form. The actualization process following this reanalysis is illustrated by examples from the Pskov Chronicle.

Grammar is one of the language features that are intricate for language learners. Owing to the fact that vocabulary has a substantial role in a language, many language learners are reluctant to know the rule of a language inside and out. Nonetheless, grammar is of value to avoid confusion towards the intended meaning. Gewerhr (1998) states that grammaticality is fundamental, thus the teaching of grammar should be central in a language classroom. Many teachers have been teaching grammar using various approaches, but still, errors are present in students’ performance in terms of grammatical accuracy. Thornbury (1999) suggested 2 different methods in the teaching of grammar: deductive and inductive. From years of experience in teaching grammar, the researcher has always opted for deductive method, since it is something that students are familiar with and saves time. For that reason, this study is conducted to find out which of the two methods works better. This research is focusing on the students’ ability to understand the specific topic, namely Participial Phrase. The participants of the research are 12 students of 4PBI1 and 11 students of 4PBI2, making 23 students in total. To find out the students’ knowledge and understanding, pre- and post-test were administered to both classes of 4PBI1 and 4PBI2. The results shown were really surprising, since the method widely and commonly adopted in the teaching of grammar was not good enough. Instead, the method which shows an intended result was inductive teaching. The pre- and post-test using such method was significantly different. Keywords : inductive teaching, deductive teaching, participial phrase

Johan Turi’s Muitalus samiid birra (An Account of the Sami) first appeared in 1910. It was the first time in history that a Sami person had written a book about the Sami in Sami language. In this article, I analyze the language of Johan Turi in the newly re-edited text of his book, particularly with regard to the order and position of auxiliaries. There are three kinds of auxiliaries in North Sami language, one of which is used in tense phrases (Aux), i.e. leat ’to be’. The other two are modals (Mod) and negative auxiliaries (Neg). In contrast to the other two types of auxiliaries, the negative does not inflect for tense. The base structure of a declarative North Sami finite clause is a composition of a main verb (V) and one or more auxiliaries in the hierarchy: Neg > Aux > Mod > V. The auxiliary (Aux) selects for a verb phrase (VP) with the category past participle or progressive, while the modal (Mod) selects for a VP with the category infinitive. The negative auxiliary selects for one category in present tense and another (past participle) in the past tense. My study of the language of Muitalus confirms the hierarchy of the base structure of the finite clauses and the selection rules of the complements as well. Turi’s text contains relatively few deviations from this pattern, always with pragmatic motivations.

This article deals with the peculiarities of the translation of non-finite forms of the verb from English into Russian in the belles-lettres. This problem is not studied well enough in modern scientific literature, while when translating non-finite forms into Russian one can face some difficulties.Sometimes while translating a text the accent falls on the lexical aspect, first of all on the shades of meaning, but sometimes invisible syntactic mistakes lead not only to stylistic mistakes, but also the misrepresentation of the meaning. Non-finite forms can be used as a subject, a predicative, part of a compound verbal and modal predicate, an object, an adverbial modifier and an attribute.The infinitive has some nominal characteristics and can be used as a subject, part of a compound nominal predicate, an object and an attribute. As for its verbal characteristics it can take a direct object and has tense and voice distinguishes. As a subject, predicative and adverbial modifiers, it can be translated with the help of the infinitive or a noun. Complexes with the infinitive can be translated by subordinate clauses. If the infinitive is passive, the Russian subordinate clause should have either a passive construction or a non-finite form. If the infinitive is perfect the predicate in the Russian sentence should be used in the past tense. If the perfect infinitive has a passive form the predicative in the Russian subordinate clause should be used in the past tense and have passive voice or a non-finite form.Complex object can be translated by a subordinate clause, while complex subject can be translated only by a compound sentence.The gerund is such a non-finite form, which cannot be found in the Russian language. It can be translated into the Russian language with the help of the infinitive, a verbal noun or a subordinate clause.The combination of the gerund with a possessive pronoun or a noun in the possessive case form an equivalent of a subordinate clause.Russian present participles can be used only as an attribute, when used in the active voice, while English participles active can be used not only as an attribute, but also as an adverbial modifier. When translating a text, one should pay attention to the place of the participle in the sentence. If it is an attribute it is translated by a Russian participle, if it is used as an adverbial modifier, it is translated by a Russian adverbial participle in the imperative aspect.Participial constructions have no any equivalents in the Russian language, so they should be translated by an adverbial subordinate clause.

This paper discusses the syntax and semantics of Active Past Participles in restrictive reduced relatives (RRs). The distribution of Active Past Participles is compared with respect to verb classes in Bulgarian, English, Italian, Slovenian and Spanish. We see that presumably the same surface participial structure has different distributional properties in these languages: in Bulgarian, Past Participles of all classes of verbs appear in RRs, while in other languages only those of unaccusative verbs do so. The differences in the distribution are accounted for by referring to the syntactic structure of the participle and semanticfea­tures on participial heads.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown promise in enhancing English as a second language (ESL) writing skills by providing personalized feedback and targeted corrections, thereby facilitating improved grammar and composition proficiency. Despite the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT, their impact on common writing errors in ESL contexts has yet to be explored. This study employed a quasi-experimental design to compare the efficacy of ChatGPT’s mobile application feedback against traditional teacher feedback in a senior secondary public school in India. Over eight weeks, the experimental group received feedback on their writing error corrections through the ChatGPT application, while the control group received feedback from teachers. Additionally, participants’ attitudes towards using ChatGPT for language learning were assessed through a questionnaire administered post-intervention to 132 students. Data was collected using pre- and post-tests that involved writing stories based on pictures. The study results demonstrated that the experimental group significantly improved writing proficiency, showing a reduction in common errors (third-person singular present, past tense, progressive, past participle, plural, possessive, comparative, and superlative) compared to the control group. Furthermore, most students preferred AI feedback, associating it with noticeable improvements in their writing skills and grammatical accuracy. These findings support the integration of AI tools like ChatGPT into language learning curricula as effective supplements to traditional teaching methods, offering personalized and immediate corrections that enhance learning outcomes.

The Old Geg perfect system has a morphology resembling that of neighbouring Romance perfects (‘have’/‘be’ + past participle). It is a major sub-system of the verbal system, using nearly all synthetic forms of the auxiliary. Moreover, there are surcomposé forms. The present perfect usually has a resultative or existential reading, other readings being very rare. The past tenses of the perfect system indicate anteriority to a reference point in past time. Among the surcomposé forms, there is a pluperfect of the perfect, which indicates a second, deeper layer of anteriority. The non-indicative forms of the perfect system serve as past-tense counterparts to the respective non-indicative categories of the synthetic verbal system. Finally, the Old Geg present perfect gives rise to the so-called admirative, a present expressing the speaker’s surprise, disbelief, irony or doubt, or his or her unwillingness to vouch for the truth of the statement given.

This research was primarily conducted to find out the total amount of grammatical errors and to analyze kinds of morphological and syntactical errors made by the fifth semester students of English Language Education Study Program of Catholic University of Saint Thomas in the Academic Year of 2018/2019 in their English compositions. There are 22 students as the research subject of the study. The writers collected the data by asking the students to write down an English composition entitled My Unforgettable Experience. The grammatical errors made by the students were analyzed based on linguistic category taxonomy (morphological and syntactical errors) proposed by Dulay et al (1982). Based on the data analysis, it was found that there are 400 grammatical errors altogether (277 morphological errors and 123 syntactical errors) made by the research subject in their English compositions. In morphological errors, the students dominantly made errors in past tense, namely 247 errors (89.2%). Next, the students made 14 errors in definite article (5.0%), 10 errors in third singular verb (3.6%), 2 errors in comparative adjective/adverb (0.7%), 2 errors in regular/irregular verbs (0.7%), 1 error in possessive case (0.4%), and 1 error in past participle (0.4%). In syntactical errors, the students dominantly made errors in transformation, namely 42 errors (34.15%). Next, the students made 30 errors in verb construction (24.39%), 25 errors in word order (20.33%), 24 errors in verb phrase (19.51%), and 2 errors in noun phrase (1.62%). It is advisable that the students had better master English grammar very well and need to equip themselves with at least a number of fundamental abilities such as how to use punctuations and construct simple sentences in the English language correctly, and the English teachers/lecturers had better explain English grammar and teach how to construct simple sentences in the English language correctly.
 
 Keywords: Error analysis, grammatical errors, morphological errors, syntactical errors, English compositions