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...

This study investigated common English writing errors made by undergraduate ESL learners at Aligarh Muslim University whose first language is Urdu-Hindi. The carried out with the help of written compositions from 20 participants. data were analyzed within a broader framework propounded S. Pit Corder. researcher concluded that study's in form spelling, copula, word choice, prepositions, verb ten...

background and purpose: multiple choice tests are the most common type of tests used in evaluating the general english knowledge of the students in most medical universities, however the efficacy of these tests are not examined precisely. we compare and examine the integrative tests and discrete point tests as   measures of the english language knowledge of medical students. methods: three test...

This paper proposes a new look at the so-called ‘present-perfect puzzle’. It suggests that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, concerning all tenses in a language situating an event one step before the moment of utterance. I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the...

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...