tailieunhanh - The grammar of the english verb phrase part 61

As to the www-examples, we have carefully checked that they are indeed exam¬ples occurring in texts produced by native speakers. All the examples have also been judged by one or more speakers whose native language is 'Standard British English'. No examples that sounded odd have been included. | III. Arguments for distinguishing between the absolute and the relative past tense 413 the present see the discussion of the Special Present Time-sphere System in 10 we cannot use a nonprogressive present tense form to locate a single durative dynamic situation at t0 I am writing a book. I write a book. grammatical only in special uses This constraint follows naturally from the following principles a t0 is linguistically conceived of as a point it has no duration. b The present tense represents the situation time as coinciding with t0. c It follows from a and b that the situation time of a present tense clause has to be punctual. d If the full situation is durative its situation time can only be conceived of as punctual if the situation is homogeneous e. g. because it is a state for example a habit or if it is represented as homogeneous by the use of the progressive form. This is not the case in I write a book which is bounded and therefore nonhomogeneous see . A nonhomogeneous sentence can only refer to the complete situation i. e. the situation time is also the time of the full situation . Needless to say it is pragmatically impossible for such a durative situation to coincide with a point. Note that this explanation is based on temporal as well as aspectual and pragmatic factors. The notions progressive homogeneous and durative are a question of grammatical or ontological aspect see and . The temporal factor in this explanation lies in the fact that it defines locating a situation time at t0 as representing the situation time as T-simultaneous coinciding with t0 . The restriction on I write a book also applies to I wrote a book in past represented speech but it does not render the sentence ungrammatical because there is another interpretation of I wrote a book on which the sentence is acceptable. Compare John said that he was writing a book. John said that he wrote a book. The first sentence is fine because was writing represents its .