This chapter presents a portrait of a language that arguably lacks absolute (i.e., deictic) and relative (i.e., anaphoric) tenses and temporal connectives with meanings comparable to those of English after, before, until, and while. The language is Yucatec Maya. “Tenselessness”, the absence of tenses from the grammar of a language, has been documented for a number of languages. Yucatec goes bey...

Within the field of aging, the conceptualization and measurement of functioning has been dominated by the disability model. In this paper, one limitation of that model is described by calling attention to a distinction between three "tenses" of functioning. Inadequate attention has been paid to the distinction between the capacity to function in the abstract (hypothetical tense) and actual perf...

Roussel and Rubio proved a lemma which is essential in the proof of the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem. We give a new short proof of the main case of this lemma. In this note, we also give a short proof of Hayward’s decomposition theorem for weakly chordal graphs, relying on a Roussel–Rubio-type lemma. We recall how Roussel–Rubio-type lemmas yield very short proofs of the existence of even pairs ...

The present study was designed to investigate the impact of applying fill-in-the-map and construct-a-map techniques on EFL learners’ knowledge of tenses. To this end, sixty EFL elementary female students, who were selected based on their performance on a standardized teacher-made proficiency test, were randomly assigned into two equal experimental and control groups. In order to be convinced of...

We will extend Reed's Semi-Strong Perfect Graph Theorem by proving that unbreakable C 5-free graphs diierent from a C 6 and its complement have unique P 4-structure.

This paper presents some new arguments in favour of the biclausal analysis of the socalled periphrastic tenses. It is argued that in these constructions, the main verbs as well as the auxiliaries are marked for tense. It is also claimed that every clause contains two temporal heads: a higher T(Past) and a lower T(Future). The biclausality of periphrastic tenses is then a consequence of the way ...

The English tenses are often claimed to be deictic, i.e. to make reference to the utterance time and localize some state of affairs relative to it. For instance, the simple past is proposed to convey that the eventuality described in its scope took place at some contextually given time in the past of the utterance time. Let us call the time with respect to which the tenses locate their eventual...

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological analogies to existing past tenses stored in memo...