This year I have given several of my classes an overview of the English verb system using my concept of the Verb Circle. It seems to be helpful and clarifying.  Being a different way of conceptualizing the system, the different perspective is not always immediately accessible.It takes a little time, but, as I  have learned through dancing and guitar practice: there is only one way of becoming better at a skill – repeat, repeat, repeat.

So go to the page above and let me know what you think.

Tense and aspect

What are tenses? And why is the answer not: all verb structures? How many tenses does English really have? And does it matter? What is the semantic relationship between verb form and time? What is time? What do we mean when we talk about time? How do we talk about time? And why should this be important?

In my introduction to the concept of the Verb Structure Circle I mentioned the technical definition of ‘tense’. Tense and aspect are two terms crucial to explaining, and in my opinion, understanding, the English verb structure system. I also noted that in many if not most course books of English ALL verb structures are referred to as tenses and, as far as I can tell, ‘aspect’ is rarely used. Perfect and continuous forms are commonly related to as ‘tenses’ though they are actually referred to as ‘aspects’ in linguistic literature.

Note (2016): Some publishers of English course books like MacMillan make the distinction, as I have found in the meantime.

The reason I believe this issue to be important is because I believe understanding the difference between ‘tense’ and ‘aspect’ could help understanding English verb structures’ meaning and function better. Continue reading →

Recently I was shocked – if not really surprised – to hear that not much seems to have changed in some English classes of (German) schools. I learned about a fifth grader who was not doing very well in English. I asked what his problem seems to be and was told that he had made a lot of mistakes in his last test. Naturally, my next question was: well, what kind of mistakes, and was totally astonished as to the prime nature of his failure. Continue reading →

Harry Potter fans might answer this clearly as all characters in J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series say ‘It is I’ – something my linguistic mind always stumbles over for a brief second when reading it.  A student in one of my classes also recently asked about this.

Modern English does not have a case system, like e.g. German. The functions of subject and object in a sentence are determined by word order. Thus in the sentence – The cat is chasing the dog – who chases who(m) is clearly determined by the position of the two noun phrases ‘the cat’ and ‘the dog’. If I change the position of the noun phrases and say – The dog is chasing the cat – the situation changes dramatically from the perspective of the cat.

In German, e.g., which has a case system, we could have something like Den Hund jagte die Katze. The subject would be the cat even though Continue reading →

Modality (2)

In the first post on modality, I only covered the forms referring to a future activity:

We should leave soon.

We could go to the cinema.

She might come tomorrow.

You can/may go now.

I would like to go now.

I will go now.

We can also use modality with past time reference if we need or want to. Continue reading →

On the page The Verb Structure Circle, I discussed the four basic building blocks of the English verb: the simple forms 1 (so-called ‘simple present’) and 2 (so-called ‘simple past’) and the aspects continuous and perfect.

What this basic approach to English verb structures does not cover is modality. What is modality? Continue reading →

All parts summarizing the basic forms and combinations of the English verb structure system have been put together under the page The Verb Structure Circle, the single posts have been deleted (as I suspect them to be the reason for the page not showing correctly when using Internet Explorer 9; I read that word press blogs don’t show there when bits and pieces have been copied and pasted into posts from Office Word, which I have done with the slides.)

I’m on vacation and it seems when I am on vacation, so is my blog. I have spent the last week on the wonderful North Sea island of Amrum. The weather was great, as has been the last weeks in Germany.

For this week, I am in England and the weather is just as fine as it was on Amrum. So my blog’s vacation will continue.

The above distinction was originally made by Richard A. Close in ‘A Teacher’s Grammar’ (1992). He had already formulated his ideas 30 years before, but published a revised version in the early 90ies. I believe the distinction to be quite valuable, even if not always clear-cut.

Grammar as fact concerns such aspects of the language that are non-negotiable if I want to be able to communicate with the majority of speakers of the language. Facts of grammar describe the essential regularities or rules of a language that define it and organize its meaning. Continue reading →