This paper gives attention to the so-called Sequence of Tenses phenomenon in English and explores what sorts of factors influence tense choice. Our analysis proves that what plays the crucial role in tense choice is the reporting speaker's attitude to the message, and that he or she chooses the tense taking three simplified factors into consideration: the semantic relation between the reporting...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense...

Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences...

BACKGROUND The Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ), measuring task performance, contextual performance, and counterproductive work behavior, was developed in The Netherlands. OBJECTIVES To cross-culturally adapt the IWPQ from the Dutch to the American-English language, and assess the questionnaire's internal consistency and content validity in the American-English context. METH...

For a task of natural language understanding, the identification of tense, aspect and mood (TAM) features in a given text is of importance in itself. A closer look at the verb groups in a sentence can give the exact combination of the TAM features the verb group carries. While the verb group consisting of one word could be easily interpreted for the TAM features, the TAM features of the verb gr...

Older adults, individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), and individuals with semantic dementia (SD) produced the past tense of verbs based on present-tense carrier sentences (e.g., Everyday I ding the bell. Yesterday I_____the bell). Both regularity (i.e., whether or not -ed is used for the past tense) and consistency (i.e., the degree to which verbs of similar orthography and ph...

Usually writing teachers feel commitment to provide their learners with corrective feedback (CF) to their linguistic errors. The study investigated whether two types of written corrective feedback, indirect focused corrective feedback and indirect unfocused corrective feedback, produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by high intermediate EFL learners. In this stud...

This paper investigates how linguistic expressions of time, in particular temporal adverbs and verb tense morphemes, are used to establish temporal reference in the brain. First, a semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs is outlined. It is proposed that computing temporal reference amounts to solving a constraint satisfaction problem. Further, the results of an ERP study are presented w...

It has been suggested that damage to anterior regions of the left hemisphere results in a dissociation in the perception and lexical activation of past-tense forms. Specifically, in a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets, such patients demonstrate significant priming for irregular verbs (spoke-speak), but, unlike control participants, fail t...