The past tense in Assamese

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...

:Afrikaans passive constructions have received significant attention in the literature for almost a century. The matter of using was instead of is in past tense passives is regularly attended to, and usually condemned in certain contexts of use. This article explores three related topics regarding Afrikaans passives with the use of a corpus of Afrikaans from 1911–2010. (1) The topic of usage patterns of Afrikaans passives in general and was passives more specifically is explored by showing, among other things, a stable ratio between past and present tense verb forms and stable agentivity, as well as showing that was passives are fairly infrequent in the data and decreasing slightly. (2) The next matter concerns details of was passive use, and three different tense distinctions are found in the data: simple past tense, past perfect tense, and, somewhat unexpectedly, dissociated past tense. Some unexpected increases and decreases in usage are reported. (3) The possibility of English influence causing the ‘incorrect’ uses of was in the passive as proposed by grammars are investigated; drawing on theory on contact-induced change and the corpus data, it is proposed that Afrikaans past tense copula constructions are more likely responsible for simple past tense was passives.

Difficulty with marking past tense verbs is a clinical indicator of language disorders. However, there is too little information on language development in bilingual children living in multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore to accurately diagnose language disorders. In this study, we aimed to understand language development in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual children by examining narrative-level discourse. We conducted secondary analysis of a large data set collected in Singapore. Here, we report on a total of 36 English-dominant and balanced English-Mandarin bilingual participants who produced narratives in English and Mandarin elicited via retell tasks using wordless picture books. Participants had been allocated to language dominance groups based on parental reports and performance on vocabulary tasks. We explored their productions of English regular and irregular past tense verb forms and Mandarin perfective aspect markers and examined the effect of language dominance on production of target forms. There was no significant difference between the language dominance groups on any outcome measures. Participants produced significantly more irregular past tense verb forms than regular past tense markers in English. The percentage accuracy of regular and irregular past tense verb forms was positively correlated with English expressive vocabulary scores. There was no significant correlation between Mandarin perfective aspect markers and Mandarin vocabulary scores. These findings suggest that acquisition of past tense marking in bilingual children is dependent on exposure to target verb forms. By providing normative data, these results can support clinical decision making around assessment and diagnosis of language disorders in linguistically complex communities in which there are limited standardized assessment tools normed on relevant populations.

The objective of the study is to investigate the difficulty of using irregular verbs in the students writing an essay at the University of Babylon. The design of this study is descriptive qualitative research. The sample of the study comprised 25 students in their fourth year, and it was selected randomly. The findings of the study showed that 70% of the students were unable to use irregular cases such as verbs and adjectives incorrectly. Also, the findings show that the students use both regular and irregular verb (past) in their students' writing essays. The most dominant verb past written by the students in their students’ writing essay is an irregular verb. Regular verbs are verbs that can change according to tense and change it regularly. Regular verbs are verbs whose changes comply with normal rules, that is with add the letter -d or -ed to the verb first-form/verb-1 (infinitive) so that it becomes a verb form second/verb-2 (past tense). Several things must be considered in the way of forming regular verbs by adding the letter -ed suffix or -d in the basic verb/verb-1 (infinitive). Irregular verbs are verbs that change according to the tense and do not comply with normal compliance. The past tense Irregular verbs are not formed from basic verbs/verb-1 (infinitives) plus letters -d or -ed letters to form verb-2/past tense. Irregular verbs form their past tense differently (through) not always) through a vowel and consonant change. This study recommends students should be well-trained on how to use irregular verbs in the past tense case or changing the form of the regular adjective, and also must be memorized by the learners/students because of the difficulty to distinguish the irregular verbs among the sentences.

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...

Recent descriptions have argued that what seem to be past tense markers in Capeverdean, a Portuguese-related language spoken in Cabo Verde, are instead allomorphs of a temporal agreement morpheme (Pratas 2018a). The rationale for this goes as follows. It is true that both -ba, from the variety of Santiago, and the related (and more complex) form tava, from São Vicente, are sometimes associated with a past tense in the terms of Klein (1994): the Topic Time is located before the Time of Utterance (Pratas 2014). This is the case in (i) past progressives and past habituals. But they also appear in (ii) subordinate clauses where no past interpretation is certain, such as some conditionals and other modal contexts. Since this subordinate lexical item is often licensed in the context of past situations denoted by their respective main clauses, it seems indeed better accounted for by this recent agreement proposal. That analysis, however, still leaves open the question of what this morpheme agrees with, and this is even more intriguing when it occurs fully separated from past situations. Alternatively, the approach taken in Pratas (2021) identifies a common point between (i) and (ii): all these structures denote situations with a low degree of accessibility from the speaker’s perspective. This (in)accessibility is perceived in terms of time: in the first case, we cannot go back to the past; in the second case, external factors may (have) provide(d) an (in)accessible time location. The main goal of this paper then is to further defend this novel insight on that apparent mismatch, which can bring clues to similar problems crosslinguistically.

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 dimensions of the predicates (durativity and resultativity) in sentences where the verb could take five forms: infinitive, one imperfective past tense (imperfect, 'imparfait'), and three perfective past tenses (perfect 'passé composé', or its 'historic' form 'passé simple', and pluperfect 'plus-que-parfait'). Results show that 10-year-old children have not yet learned the 'adult' functions of verbal forms. The results of these two experiments are discussed in relation to current models of human cognition.

This article provides information about the work of Al-Mu’izzi Tasrif al-Af’al, dedicated to the forms of verbs in Arabic. The Fund of Manuscripts of the Institute of Oriental Studies named after Abu Raykhan Beruni of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan has 7 seven manuscripts of Mu’izzi’s work. Al-Mu’izzi’s work consists of four main sections, which, in turn, are divided into chapters, that is, smaller groups. The first chapter describes the changes in conjugating verbs in the past, present, and future tenses and the imperative mood. The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of regular verbs, the third chapter to doubled verbs, the fourth chapter to empty verbs, the fifth chapter to insufficient verbs, the sixth chapter to lafif verbs, the seventh chapter to multitavi verbs, the eighth chapter to the study of the topic nun at-taqid. The article also discusses the forms of verbs of different types, their forms of the past and present future tenses, the types of verbs with the correct threeconsonant root, and the four-consonant verbs mazid. The phonology is related to the science of sarf, and we explained that if one of the six guttural sounds is the second or third consonant of the stem of the verb, then its vowel becomes fatha, not kasra. In addition, we describe the first kind of verbs ,مجردderivatives of the verbs ,مزيد فيهthe rules for the formation of forms of derivatives. We listed six types of verbs muzharrad ( ) فعل ثلاثي مجردin the work of Al-Mu’izzi. Based on a comparative analysis, the article examines the classifications of verb types by B.M. Grande and Al-Mu’izzi in Tasrif al-Af’al, as well as the reasons for presenting the IV type of verbs Mazid by the model , ْ إفعَ َّ الwhich at one time attracted the attention of grammarians Ash-Shumuni and Ibn al-Kita’. The differences between the classification of AlMu’izzi verb forms and the currently accepted classification of Arabic verb forms are also scientifically substantiated.

Purpose: This study addresses the question of whether sequential bilingual children’s past tense marking development in their second language (L2) is affected by their knowledge of temporal marking in their first language (L1). We investigated whether Cantonese-English sequential bilingual children’s knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese (L1), along with external and internal factors, predicts their past tense marking in English (L2). Method: We examined 39 pre-school children’s production of perfective aspect markers in Cantonese and regular and irregular past tense morphemes in English using a story-retell task administered in both languages. Result: The results showed that children produced significantly more irregular past tense verbs than regular past tense verbs in English. Their English irregular past tense use, but not regular past tense use, was predicted by their knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese. Conclusion: Findings suggest that semantic transfer between Cantonese and English might contribute to the early stages of acquiring English past tense marking. Clinically, the results could potentially lead to more informed assessment procedures and better diagnostic decision making for bilingual children.

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.

Reviewed by: Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language by Mary D. Swift Edward J. Vajda Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language. By Mary D. Swift. (Studies on language acquisition 24.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xii, 315. ISBN 3110181207. $137 (Hb). Most studies of child language acquisition up till now have focused on Indo-European or the major languages of East Asia. An investigation of how children master the typologically very different structure of a language such as Inuktitut is therefore of considerable theoretical interest. This book describes how children up to the age of three and a half acquire the mechanisms of time reference in the Tarramiut (Hudson Strait) subdialect of Inuktitut, a language spoken by about fifteen hundred Inuit in arctic Quebec. Introductory chapters describe the tense-aspect-mood system of adult Inuktitut, and survey what is known crosslinguistically about how TAM morphology is acquired in early childhood. The data analyzed derive from corpora collected from eight children for two previous studies: Cultural context in communicative interaction of young Inuit children by Martha Crago (Montreal: McGill University dissertation, 1988) and Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut by Shanley Allen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996). Note that S investigates the acquisition of a different facet of language structure from these earlier studies. Her description of the verb morphology in adult Tarramiut is also important, given the lack of any comparable overview. Publications on related aspects of Inuktitut grammar or other Inuit dialects are surveyed briefly on pp. 8–11. The last six chapters document how young children learning Inuktitut as a native language master increasingly more complex tense-aspect structures. The first verb forms acquired are zero-marked for tense-aspect. Among these, telic verbs tend to be used to express past completed events, while atelic verbs express present ongoing events. S shows how children later add suffixes marking viewpoint aspect, as well as suffixes marking degrees of temporal remoteness in the past or future. The results are particularly illuminating when compared to existing studies of European languages since this represents the first study of child acquisition of morphemes marking temporal remoteness. S uncovers a number of patterns that pose a challenge to previous assumptions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. All of these, however, find explanation in light of the system of time reference characteristic of adult Inuktitut. For example, because Inuktitut encodes a basic future/nonfuture distinction rather than the more familiar past/nonpast dichotomy characteristic of European languages, the Inuit children surveyed naturally developed future markers before past markers. They also used overt past tense markers with atelic verbs first rather than with telic verbs. These findings contrast with studies based on the acquisition of European languages, where past tense marking with telic verbs is primary, and future markers appear later than markers of past tense. S’s results clearly testify to the importance of examining as broad a typological range of languages as possible before drawing conclusions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. The book ends with suggestions for future research, including the need to measure passive knowledge of time reference mechanisms in young Inuit children, as well as to examine acquisition in older children acquiring Inuktitut as a native language. Finally, one can only hope this study will stimulate investigations into how children acquire other complex morphologies. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America ...

Author(s): Mittaz, Corinne | Abstract: This paper presents the verbal categories tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality of Brokpa, both from a functional and diachronic perspective. Additionally, verb stem alternations in Brokpa are briefly presented and compared with those of Classical Tibetan. Verbal categories in Brokpa are formed both morphologically through suffixes and analytically through syntactically complex constructions. The past tense marker -pi is treated in some detail, since it evinces a complex allomorphy which is no longer transparent and only explicable with reference to Classical Tibetan.

Rupturing implicature in the Mapudungun verbal system: The suffix- [formula omitted

This study examined the productivity and representation of past-tense marking in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants were 11 6-year-olds with SLI, 11 age-matched controls, and 11 MLU-matched controls. Regular and irregular verbs were used to examine the productivity of regular marking. Past-tense representation was examined by asking children to inflect homophonous pairs of denominal and irregular root verbs. All three groups demonstrated productive marking of past tense, although as expected the accuracy of the impaired groups was less than that of earlier control group. Patterns of past-tense marking as a function of a word's phonological composition and inflectional frequency were the same for the SLI- and MLU-matched groups, and all children presented a past-tense system that was sensitive to grammatical structure. The findings replicate previous research of the SLI morphological system and provide additional specification of these children's morphological strengths and weaknesses. Strengths include the children's sensitivity to grammatical and phonological characteristics of the lexicon; weaknesses include limited productivity of regular past-tense marking and a greater sensitivity to frequency manipulations as compared to normally developing children. Results are discussed in terms of the nature of the SLI profile. They also are used to evaluate the theoretical model on which the study was based.

Associations Between Key Language-Related Measures in Typically Developing School-Age Children