tailieunhanh - The grammar of the english verb phrase part

The sign # is put before forms that arc not ungrammatical or unacceptable but do not express the meaning that is intended in the clause or sentence under discussion. For example, in , the following example is given | II. Uses of the absolute past tense 203 tion a place adverbial may sometimes give only a very general idea of when the situation actualized. All that is required is that the situation can be located with sufficient precision for the purposes of the discourse. Thus I learned to swim in Australia uttered when the hearer knows that the speaker was in Australia between the ages of twenty and twenty-five is sufficiently precise to convey the message I was already an adult when I learned to swim and this may be the main point that the speaker wishes to communicate by using the adverbial. b There may be other constituents in the clause that are pragmatically linked with a particular past time. I haven t got any cash left. I gave all mine to the milkman . Reference to the milkman implies this morning in the default case assuming that the milkman comes every morning. Did the ferry bring any visitors to the island implicit time when the ferry came to the island as it does e. g. around noon every day c If there are no constituents in the sentence indicating or suggesting a specific past time such a time may still be recoverable from the linguistic or extralinguistic context. Did you switch off the lights implicit time when we left I couldn t resist buying this book. The hearer is expected to interpret the temporal location as being the specific time when the speaker was in the bookshop. This time does not have to be identifiable definite to the hearer it needn t be identifiable to the speaker either because the speaker may have forgotten the exact time when he bought the book. All that is required is that the speaker and hearer take it as given that there was an occasion of buying the book. In some cases past time reference is pragmatically inferrable from the immediate situation of speaking. Thus if I see you with a broken leg I can ask the question How did you break your leg The fact that you have broken it hence that there was a time when you broke it is given assumed .