Tense and temporal ordering in English and Dutch indirect speech

Boogaart, Ronny

doi:10.1075/pbns.43.15boo

Cited by 20 publications

(27 citation statements)

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“…An analysis along these lines would see our results as supporting the view that L1 transfer plays a crucial role in the acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology. Although this is an interesting possibility, whether English event verbs are always perfective is an issue which is currently under debate and needs to be further clarified (see Bogaart, 1999; Brinton, 1988; Smith, 1991). We leave it for further research to further explore this line of research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of dynamic contrasts in the L2 acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology

et al. 2012

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This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of dynamic contrasts in the L2 acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology

et al. 2012

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“…Further evidence for this account of the simultaneity reading for the complement clause of (1) comes from Boogaart's (1996) comparison of Dutch and English past tenses. He argues that the Dutch simple past is more imperfective than the English simple past.…”

Section: Simultaneous To the Time Of Speakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time reference in reported speech

Salkie¹,

Reed²

1997

English Language and Linguistics

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English tenses in indirect reported speech appear to behave in unusual ways. In John said that he was happy, the most likely interpretation is that John's being happy was simultaneous with the time of John's speaking. This has led many analysts to invoke a ‘Sequence of Tenses’ rule, while others have proposed that English has two formally identical but semantically distinct past tenses, treating was in the preferred interpretation as a ‘relative past’. Under either treatment, a simple semantics for English tenses cannot be maintained.This paper argues that time reference in reported speech can only be analysed within a coherent theory of speech reporting. We propose a new way of distinguishing direct and indirect reported speech, based on the notion of Pragmatic Source. Within this framework we then argue that tense in indirect reported speech can be handled by pragmatic principles, without any enrichment of the semantics of tense.Previous analyses of tense in reported speech by Comrie and Declerck are examined and rejected. Unlike other accounts of reported speech, our approach does not presuppose an ‘original utterance’.

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“…In those cases where the incorrect reported speech word order did not reflect an influence from the presence of the auxiliary verb in the structure of the English direct question, it did reflect influence from the subject-verb inversion of the L1-Dutch direct question, also demonstrated in the case of the L1-Spanish speakers who had that structure in common in their corresponding L1 (see also Escutia, 2002). In other words, surface overlap between Dutch and English reported speech (e.g., Boogaart, 1996) did not suffice to prevent the occurrence of word order errors in the production of the latter.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…This is a reasonable assumption, despite the fact that the prime sentences in the current design might have boosted the activation of the structure of direct-questions, because it is difficult to think how one could report indirectly the information provided in a direct wh-question without activating it if one's thoughts are linked to linguistic representations (Levelt, 1989). More importantly though, our assumption rests on the use of tenses in reported speech which is guided by formal and/or semantic operations of direct speech (Boogaart, 1996;Comrie, 1986). In other words, apart from correct word order, the speaker has to choose the correct tense in reported speech and this choice depends on the point of reference that is adopted when considering the relationship between the direct question and the reporting event.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, according to the instructions of the present experiment, participants had to report an event that just took place. If they did not consider that the embedding clause defined the frame of reference for what was described in the embedded clause, then backshift into past perfect would be optional, and the speaker could maintain the simple past tense (Boogaart, 1996;Declerck, 1990;Janssen, 1996). Simple past in English reported speech is also usually preferred to past perfect when both tenses point to a definite use, for reasons of economy (Aarts & Wekker, 1987:217).…”

Section: Scoring and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is language interference (when it occurs) agradedor anall-or-noneeffect? Evidence from bilingual reported speech production

Hatzidaki¹,

Santesteban

Duyck

2018

Bilingualism

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Do cross-lingual interactions occur even with structures of different word order in different languages of bilinguals? Or could the latter provide immunity to interference of the contrasting characteristics of the other language? To answer this question, we examined the reported speech production (utterances reporting what just happened; e.g., Holly asked what Eric ate) of two groups of proficient, unbalanced bilinguals with varying similarity between their native (L1-Spanish/L1-Dutch) and second language (L2-English). The results showed that both groups of bilinguals produced word order errors when formulating indirect What-questions in L2, regardless of how similar the L1 was to the L2 in that respect. Our findings suggest that in the case of reported speech production in the examined bilingual groups, cross-linguistic syntactic differences by themselves suffice to induce language interference, and that the degree of similarity between the L1 and the L2 does not seem to modulate the magnitude of this effect.

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Tense and temporal ordering in English and Dutch indirect speech

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

The role of dynamic contrasts in the L2 acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology

The role of dynamic contrasts in the L2 acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology

Time reference in reported speech

Is language interference (when it occurs) agradedor anall-or-noneeffect? Evidence from bilingual reported speech production

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