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Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2, University of Hamburg, course: Tense, Aspect and Modality, language: English, abstract: In their analysis of the perfect in English and German Klein and Vater postulate that the English present perfect and the German Perfekt are very much the same except that the Perfekt has two additional usages. They refer to Anderson (Anderson, 1982:228) and list five major usages of perfect in the English language to which exist corresponding usages in the German Perfekt and give the following examples – the example for the present continuous is left out because it does not concern the analysis given in this paper: 1. Experiential Have you ever been to Japan? Sind sie je in Japan gewesen? 2. Current relevance of anterior He has studied the whole book. (So he can help.) Paul hat sich mit Biologie befasst. (Paul kennt sich damit aus.) 3. New situation, „hot news“ The Etna has just erupted! Eben hat es geblitzt! 4. Result-state He has gone. (or) He is gone. (is not here) Er ist weggegangen. (Er ist weg.) The two additional functions they see are that the Perfekt can easily relate to the future and often functions like the English simple past as can be shown by the following examples: 1. The Colossus of Rhodos weighed 100 tons. Der Koloss von Rhodos hat 100 Tonnen gewogen 2. Tomorrow at ten, Peter will have left London. Morgen um zehn hat Peter London verlassen. In their proceeding they postulate that the tense systems of English and German do not mainly differ with respect to the perfect but that the role of the present tense is to blame for the observation made in the beginning. They base this conclusion on an excerpt from Comrie who wrote about the compositional structure of the perfect – being a composite of a present tense auxiliary and a past participle – that “the present auxiliary conveys the present meaning, while the past participle conveys that of past action” (Comrie, 1976:107). Klein and Vater’s assumption is that in the English language the present tense is closely bound to the moment of speech whereas in German it is relatively free in this regard (Klein/Vater, 1998:221). This led to a lively discussion in the course with two main points. The first being whether it is justified to state that English and German differ crucially in their usage of the present tense, and the second, assuming this difference really exists, whether it is the reason for the additional functions of the Perfekt.
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2, University of Hamburg, course: Tense, Aspect and Modality, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In their analysis of the perfect in English and German Klein and Vater postulate that the English present perfect and the German Perfekt are very much the same except that the Perfekt has two additional usages. They refer to Anderson (Anderson, 1982:228) and list five major usages of perfect in the English language to which exist corresponding usages in the German Perfekt and give the following examples - the example for the present continuous is left out because it does not concern the analysis given in this paper: 1. Experiential Have you ever been to Japan? Sind sie je in Japan gewesen? 2. Current relevance of anterior He has studied the whole book. (So he can help.) Paul hat sich mit Biologie befasst. (Paul kennt sich damit aus.) 3. New situation, "hot news" The Etna has just erupted! Eben hat es geblitzt! 4. Result-state He has gone. (or) He is gone. (is not here) Er ist weggegangen. (Er ist weg.) The two additional functions they see are that the Perfekt can easily relate to the future and often functions like the English simple past as can be shown by the following examples: 1. The Colossus of Rhodos weighed 100 tons. Der Koloss von Rhodos hat 100 Tonnen gewogen 2. Tomorrow at ten, Peter will have left London. Morgen um zehn hat Peter London verlassen. In their proceeding they postulate that the tense systems of English and German do not mainly differ with respect to the perfect but that the role of the present tense is to blame for the observation made in the beginning. They base this conclusion on an excerpt from Comrie who wrote about the compositional structure of the perfect - being a composite of a present tense auxiliary and a past participle - that "the present auxiliary conveys the present meaning, while the past particip
This book is the first book-length study on the Swedish present perfect. It provides an in-depth exploration of the present perfect in English, German and Swedish. It is claimed that only a discourse-based ExtendedNow-approach fully accounts for the present perfect. The main claim is that the length of the ExtendedNow-interval varies cross-linguistically. The book is couched within the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory and also within Distributed Morphology. It is shown that Swedish provides empirical evidence against all previous research in the field. The following questions are investigated: Is it possible to assign a single uniform meaning to the present perfect? How can we account for the different readings of the perfect? How can we account for the cross-linguistic variation? These issues are addressed from a comparative perspective by integrating previous research on the present perfect. This book is of interest to all those working in the field of tense and aspect.
Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2003 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Komparatistik, Note: 1,00, Freie Universität Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), Veranstaltung: Understanding English-German Contrasts, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Within the last two decades many attempts have been made to define a generally accepted concept of universal temporal and aspectual systems. There are comprehensive studies about the grammatical functions of tense and aspect, their categories and their meaning. In regard to their tense systems, English and German show amazing parallels in the inventory of forms but there are major differences in their use and function. The following paper gives an overview of English and German tense and aspect systems and presents traditional and current theories and controversies on them. Moreover, an attempt will be made to discuss in detail function and use of the perfect, future and progressive construction in these two languages.
Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: This paper is going to provide an insight into contrasts between the English and German language. Due to a shared origin from the Indo-European languages, the two languages are perceived to be similar enough to have sufficient things in common in order to establish comparability but are at the same time also distinctive enough to show significant contrasts. The essential theme of this paper argues that English and German may exhibit formal parallels on the surface, however, accommodate very different underlying usages and internal structures. Due to a limited length of this paper the discussion of contrasts is restricted to the resultative and narrative usage of the Present Perfect tense as well as to declarative main clauses in the syntax.
1. OUTLINE German has the three main perfect constructions which are illustrated in (1. 1). 1 In each of these constructions, the verb appears in the past participial form and is combined with an auxiliary - in this case, haben ('have'); other verbs form their perfect constructions with the auxiliary sein ('be'). 2 The auxiliary can then be com bined with a tense -Le. the present tense as in (Ua), the past tense as in (b), or the future tense as in (c). 3 (1. 1) a. PRESENT PERFECT: Die Eule hat die Schule verlassen. the owl has the school left b. PAST PERFECT: Die Eule hatte die Schule verlassen. the owl had the school left c. FUTURE PERFECT: Die Eule wird die Schule verlassen haben. the owl will the school left have As will shortly become clear, the present perfect is the most intricate of the perfect constructions in German. It has been investigated intensely in the past, with the result that today there is little doubt about what the core problems concerning its semantics are.
Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar I: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: As English and German are both Germanic languages they are closely related. However, there are still a lot of differences to be found when comparing the two languages. This is among other things due to the fact that English and German represent different language types. Among the grammatical categories relating to which the two languages can be analysed, tense and aspect are certainly salient. Before starting to analyse both languages with regard to these categories, the difference between tense and aspect has to be clarified. Tense is both a deictic and a relational category. Therefore it locates an event on the time line usually with reference to the time of speaking. Aspect, by contrast, does not locate an event or situation on the time line nor does it relate the time of one situation to another. It is rather concerned with “the internal temporal constituency of one situation”. This term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use and expression of tense and aspect taking the perspective of a learner. First the three stages of tense and aspect acquisition by learners will be described in general terms. Particular attention will be paid to the influence of instruction on the learners. Then this term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use of tense. This will be illustrated on the example of the different uses of the perfect. Afterwards the focus will be on aspect. While English uses the progressive to indicate a change of aspect, there is no such formal equivalent in the German language. Therefore German learners of English are confronted with the question of how to express this “internal constituency of one situation” in their mother tongue. Various devices that are used by German learners of English to express the progressive will be exemplified. Both the section on tense and the section on the progressive will conclude with a focus on the difficulties for and the typical errors made by the learners. However, as there is no material available concerning English learners of German, only the German learners of English will be taken into account.
Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar I: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: As English and German are both Germanic languages they are closely related. However, there are still a lot of differences to be found when comparing the two languages. This is among other things due to the fact that English and German represent different language types. Among the grammatical categories relating to which the two languages can be analysed, tense and aspect are certainly salient. Before starting to analyse both languages with regard to these categories, the difference between tense and aspect has to be clarified. Tense is both a deictic and a relational category. Therefore it locates an event on the time line usually with reference to the time of speaking. Aspect, by contrast, does not locate an event or situation on the time line nor does it relate the time of one situation to another. It is rather concerned with "the internal temporal constituency of one situation". This term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use and expression of tense and aspect taking the perspective of a learner. First the three stages of tense and aspect acquisition by learners will be described in general terms. Particular attention will be paid to the influence of instruction on the learners. Then this term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use of tense. This will be illustrated on the example of the different uses of the perfect. Afterwards the focus will be on aspect. While English uses the progressive to indicate a change of aspect, there is no such formal equivalent in the German language. Therefore German learners of English are confronted with the question of how to express this "internal constituency of one situation" in their mother tongue. Various devices that are used by German learners of
This book deals with the use of the present perfect and the preterite in both English and German. The aim of the investigation is to find out to what extent the use of the present perfect and the preterite varies in English and German and how the original forms are translated into the other language, i.e. whether specific translation patterns can be found. To begin with, a theoretical part summarizes earlier researches by various authors before the main part of the thesis is presented. The research part is a corpus-based analysis, using the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. First of all, original English and German preterite forms and present perfect forms are investigated. Then, it is presented to which extent their translations into German and English differ from the original verb forms.