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تسجيل

Tense, Aspect, and Modality Conclusion

المؤلف:  PAUL R. KROEGER

المصدر:  Analyzing Grammar An Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  P168-C9

2026-01-13

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Tense, Aspect, and Modality Conclusion

We have touched on a number of difficult and complex issues, about which many books have been written and much more is still to be learned. One of our primary goals has been to help you to understand and use correctly the terminology that linguists have developed for describing TAM systems.

A second goal, of course, is to lay a foundation for analyzing these systems. The semantic contrasts that we have discussed are not always easy to identify, and languages often differ from each other in quite subtle ways in these areas. Even where two languages have superficially similar sets of TAM affixes, the specific semantic content of a particular affix in one language often has no exact equivalent in the other language. For this reason, we cannot base our analysis of these systems on simple translations into English or the local trade language. Instead, we must look for examples of minimal contrast between two related affixes or markers, and then try to identify specific contexts where one would be acceptable but the other would not. This is a time-consuming process, but it is the only way we can be sure which semantic features are relevant to an observed grammatical distinction.