By Tenses, Inflections

"Linguists reserve the technical term "tense" for true inflection, i.e, one that produces a real change in a single word, as in Latin or Spanish, which are inflectional languages and have a lot of tenses, all encompassed paradigmatically. English really has only two actual tenses: present...

Do you mean that the modals can mark a temporal category? Is that category "syntactic tense?" Even so, I don't see how you can "inflect" a modal for anything. Inflection is morphological. Can you provide me with an example of an inflected modal aux. ? Are you saying that the differences in form...

That's interesting, equivical. What is the nature of the inflection? Tense is a morphological thing: Smoke -Present Tense Smoked -Past Tense Will smoke = future time. See that the verb is without an affix of any kind? There is no future tense in English. We use a modal to refer to future...

Dear Cacarr, modals can be inflected for tense but only syntactic tense. I'd be interested in seeing some of those "inflections", equivocal.

For my home grammar assignment I am to "describe the form of the verb phrases in the following sentences (:finiteness, tense, modality, aspect, voice): 1. The house had been painted a bright red before it was sold. 2. Pigeons will be nesting on the statue's head. 3. It is good to have seen them...

1. 'Last week, I may go sailing.' I find this sentence baffling: it seems to contradict itself. The contradiction seems to reside in the opposition of 'may' and 'last week'. I myself would describe this as a conflict of context (past) and tense (non-past). How would you describe it? The...

1. If the car breaks down on you, you would have to pay for the repair, if you didn't buy the warranty. You can think of the conditional as a contraint. So in the above there are two conditions: 1) IF the proposition (the car breaks down on you). Because you have two if-clauses in your...

Your negative sentence is in the past tense, Melanie, where the third person singular inflection does not appear. He doesn't have three cars'-- it is the operator ('do' here) which takes the '-s' inflection.

Many Singaporeans do speak very good English, but the reason many western native English speakers don't consider that Singaporeans in general speak 'native English' is because of the predominance of the Singlish dialect. Singlish in it's most extreme forms lacks inflection for tense and plural...

Su's post: I always wonder some thing in English grammar. For instance, the sentence: I drive him. 'I' is the subject. 'Him' is the object. Yet their position have told us this too. Is that means the English grammar is sort of double expressing? For if the sentences of: I him drive. drive I...