The position of any event in time could be in the present, past, or future. This temporal discrimination is vitally important in our daily conversations, but it remains elusive how the human brain distinguishes among the past, present, and future. To address this issue, we searched for neural correlates of presentness, pastness, and futurity, each of which is automatically evoked when we hear sentences such as “it is raining now,” “it rained yesterday,” or “it will rain tomorrow.” Here, we show that sentences that evoked “presentness” activated the bilateral precuneus more strongly than those that evoked “pastness” or “futurity.” Interestingly, this contrast was shared across native speakers of Japanese, English, and Chinese languages, which vary considerably in their verb tense systems. The results suggest that the precuneus serves as a key region that provides the origin (that is, the Now) of our time perception irrespective of differences in tense systems across languages.

This paper investigates the interface of social and linguistic factors in contact-induced language change with data from Hiberno-English (HE). The evidence from my survey suggests that morphosyntactic forms in HE are unevenly marked in speakers' subjective judgments of use, non-use, Irishness and 'bad grammar'. This study particularly examines the cause of the contrasting judgements between the do be and be after forms. The examination leads to the suggestion of the constraint of morphosyntactic conformity and provides further theoretical perspectives on the role of speakers.

This article examines how certain characteristic grammatical forms in Hiberno-English (HE) are the result of a dynamic process of language formation guided by language contact. A first language contact between Irish and English gives rise to the grammar formation of HE, and a second contact between HE and other varieties of English, presumably over the past 50 years or so, has pruned HE to fit the speakers' awareness toward the standard norm. Examinations of the expressions of tense/aspect and information structure in HE lead to suggestion of grammatical oppositions being inherited from Irish and the resilience of this inheritance in present-day HE. Taking three salient characteristics of HE, the be after perfect, the do be habitual, and the 'tis….. construction as windows to its underlying properties, the article surveys earlier forms in the rise of HE and describes some facets of contemporary HE. One of the central issues in the examination is Irish language traits and their realization in HE morphosyntax. The article concludes by proposing an integrated perspective across the characteristics and a model to capture the grammar formation of HE, which can be applied to find similarities and contrasts with other language contact phenomena.

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