Thesis (DLitt)--Stellenbosch University, 2004. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: One of the questions that have challenged scholars of BH for many years is whether the language should be regarded as a tense, aspectual or modal language. In this thesis, I argue that the lack and application of a metacategory for describing any language in general, and BH in particular, has been the main problem of the debate. A sound methodology is needed in order to be able to make an argument that can be tested empirically. The present study presents such a viable methodological approach. Using Bhatian parameters for tense, aspect and modal prominent languages, crosslinguistic metacategories of tense, aspect and mood were developed. These were applied to BH and the outcome was the hypothesis that BH is an aspect-prominent language. After formulating the above-mentioned hypothesis for BH, a corpus had been selected in the light of which the hypothesis was tested. The result demonstrates that BH consistently maintains perfective and imperfective aspectual distinctions. It was found that even where aspectual distinctions are extended to modal categories, the distinction in meanings between the perfective and the imperfective forms of the BH verb are not neutralised. From these observations, it has been concluded that there is the need to revisit the semantics of Proto Semitic. A model like the one used in this study could be replicated in the study of Proto Semitic. Such a revisit, it is hypothesised, may give fresh insights into the verbal system of Proto Semitic in general and BH in particular / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Een van die vrae wat reeds vir baie jare vir kenners van Byblese Hebreeus (=BH) In uitdaging is, is of die taal 'n tempustaal, 'n aspektuele taal of 'n modale taal is. In hierdie tesis voer ek aan dat die gebrek aan die toepassing van 'n metakategorie vir die beskrywing van tale in die algemeen, en BH in die besonder, die hoof probleem in die debat is. 'n Deeglike begronde metodologie is nodig om 'n hipotese daar te stel wat empiries getoets kan word. Hierdie studie wil so 'n metodologie formuleer. Deur gebruik te maak van Bhat se parameters vir tale waarvan die tempus, aspek en modaliteit prominent is, is kruislinguistiese metakategorieë vir tempus, aspek en modaliteit ontwikkel. Hierdie metakategorieë is op BH toegepas en die resultaat daarvan was die hipotese dat BH 'n aspek-prominente taal is. Nadat die bogenoemde hipotese vir BH geformuleer is, is 'n korpus geselekteer in die lig waarvan hierdie hipotese getoets kon word. Die resultaat demonstreer dat BH konsekwent die perfektiewe en imperfektiewe aspektuele onderskeid handhaaf. Daar is gevind dat selfs wanneer aspektuele onderskeidings uitgebrei is na modale kategorieë, die onderskeid tussen die perfektiewe en die imperfektiewe vorme van die BH werkwoord nie geneutraliseer word me. Vanuit hierdie waarnemings is tot die gevolgtrekking gekom dat dit nodig is om weer te gaan kyk na die semantiek van Proto-Semities. 'n Model soos die een wat in hierdie studie gebruik is, kan ook in die studie van Proto-Semities bebruik word. Die hipotese is dat so 'n hernude ondersoek nuwe insigte kan gee in die werkwoordsisteem van Proto-Semities in die algemeen en BH in die besonder.

This study investigated the relative clause formation and the coding of tense in the English interlanguage of thirty-two Palestinian students at the six colleges of the Islamic University of Gaza.Three composition topics were designed to elicit the learners' expression of the various English tenses and relative clauses.Findings: The data show that Palestinian learners' switching of tense results from using English morphology to express an aspectual system similar to that of Palestinian Arabic. The English past tense and present tense are used to mark Palestinian perfective and imperfective aspects, respectively. The subject-verb agreement marker and the concord markers 's/is and 'm/am are omitted in relative clauses and when there is a change in aspect.In the area of relative clauses, the data show that relative clauses are ninety percent independent of the Palestinian Arabic structuring of relative clauses. The learners use resumptive pronouns not only in clauses where the predicate incorporates a noun, adjective, or a prepositional phrase, but also before verbs. Conclusions:1. There is a large amount of influence from the Palestinian aspectual system on the learners' use of English tense.2. Subject-verb agreement problems can be solved when the problem of tense shift is solved, because of the cooccurrence of these phenomena.3. EFL teachers in Gaza Strip should not over-react to their students' tense usage in narrative passages and should not require them to write in a particular tense in an artificial manner.4. The learners' errors should be tolerated and should not be considered as indications of faulty learning.

Orientador: Ruth Elisabeth Vasconcellos Lopes / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-18T05:22:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Arvigo_MariaClaudia_M.pdf: 2310306 bytes, checksum: bb233c9ad0e9205ce7d4d95f43360732 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: Crianças acometidas pelo Déficit Específico de Linguagem (DEL) apresentam dificuldades na composição da estrutura gramatical de sua língua. Uma das dificuldades mais documentadas refere-se à morfologia de tempo, sendo que esta categoria funcional pode ser omitida assistematicamente ou substituída de forma irregular. Tempo e Aspecto encontram-se relacionados intrinsecamente, impossibilitando o estudo do primeiro sem a observação do segundo. Estudos anteriores referem que crianças com DEL apresentam bom reconhecimento de temporalidade (passado, presente e futuro), mas encontram relativa dificuldade em compreender a relação entre eventos completos/ incompletos e o passado progressivo (aspecto gramatical imperfectivo). Este comportamento seria resultado de uma baixa sensibilidade às propriedades aspectuais, evidenciada pela pouca ou nenhuma variação do desempenho com relação ao aspecto lexical. Tais resultados referem-se a pesquisas com crianças anglófonas, já o presente estudo buscou verificar se o mesmo ocorre em crianças com DEL adquirindo o português brasileiro. Resultados encontrados demonstram que os indivíduos participantes apresentam variações em seu comportamento que podem ser atribuídas à presença do aspecto lexical, enfraquecendo a hipótese da insensibilidade aspectual, ao menos no que se refere ao português brasileiro. Outra questão abordada foi a distinção entre evento e não-evento por meio de pares de figuras representando um evento e um objeto tanto com verbos e nomes existentes na língua como com palavras novas ou pseudopalavras. O que se viu foi o melhor desempenho com verbos, demonstrando sensibilidade às pistas morfológicas ao menos com palavras pertencentes ao léxico / Abstract: Children affected by the Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulties with the composition of the grammatical structure of their language. One of the most documented difficulties concerns the tense morphology, a functional category that can be unsystematically omitted or irregularly replaced. Tense and Aspect are intrinsically linked, making it impossible to study the first without observing the latter. According to previous researches, children with SLI show good recognition of temporality (past, present and future), but find relative difficulty in understanding the relationship between complete/ incomplete events and past progressive (imperfective grammatical aspect). This behavior would be the result of a low sensitivity to the aspectual proprieties, evidenced by little or no change in performance with regards to lexical aspect. These results have been seen in other researches with English-speaking children, and this study sought to verify whether the same occurs in children with SLI acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. Results have shown that individuals vary in their behavior, which can be attributed to the presence of lexical aspect, weakening the hypothesis of aspectual insensitivity, at least in relation to Brazilian Portuguese. Another issue discussed was the distinction between event and nonevent by means of pairs of figures representing an event and an object with both real verbs and real nouns as with new verbs and nouns or pseudo-words. What we saw was that the best performance happened with verbs, demonstrating sensitivity to morphological clues at least with words belonging to the lexicon / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística