A recent piece of oral girlfriends research examines the co-occurence relations which exist between the various types of temporal adverbials and the tenses of English. The research is based on an actual corpus of material. It challenges the view that the meanings lie in the verbs alone and suggests that the time relations are specified by the verb and adverb forms together—that the verbs alone often cannot carry the features of time. Indeed if it is not dominated by an adverbial, or if the chronological significance is not clear from the situation, then the verb is very likely to be ambiguous. A oral girlfriends verb may be dominated by an adverbial which is not actually in the same sentence, but which may have occurred several sentences previously and not have been cancelled, as it were, by the subsequent occurrence of some contrary expression of time. If a tense does not have a chronological meaning so much as certain possibilities of co-occurrence with time adverbials, the teacher must ask himself, not 'What meanings of these tenses shall I teach and what adverbials shall I select to highlight these meanings?' but 'What patterns of co-occurrence of adverbials and tense do we find in English?' |
