Grammar pieces are hot buttons, alive and active and sharp

Wow! I was just told that my blog was deleted. Fortunately, I just got it back. I'm not backed up )-:

Sorry I've been away so long. Life has been a bit topsy-turvey lately.

I talked about "proper grammar" as normally understood in the popular mind in literate languacultures--that is, it is treated almost as a moral issue, but it happens that the children of the people with power, talk more "properly" than the children of people with little power, since it's the native speech form of the people with power.

Now the host-world guardians of good morals would be concerned if another host says

Me and my two kids went there yesterday.

Instead of

My two kids and I went there yesterday.

These could both come out of the mouths of host people, and carry differing social meanings about the speaker. But if you think of second language learning, the issue really isn't really much about things like

Me and my two kids went there yesterday.  vs.  My two kids and I went there yesterday.

Rather, it is about non-host-people saying things such as

Yesterday, me and my two kid, we going there.

What often appears to me to be the case is that even with foreign speech, the idea of speaking properly  as a moral concern carries over to foreigner's weird speech, too. I think I have sensed this the most in Russia, hearing teachers talk about how wrongly foreigners get things. Tsk, tsp, tsp!

Now bad grammar often works fine. So why the moral urgency about good grammar? Well, anyway, what is grammar? (And is it master or servant.)

Well, I think to most literate, second language students, Grammar is the collection of instructions for forming sentences that are "well-formed" or "grammatical". Grammar is the recipe, or recipe book, that you follow in order to talk correctly. It doesn't actually do anything except make the form of the sentence correct. It's about getting the right pieces in the right places.

In the GPA, we instead view grammatical elements as "processing cues". The bits of grammar include words like the, and could but also suffixes like -ing, and the order of words, and the rhythmic patterns that show the phrasing of a sentence. These elements of grammar are not lifeless pieces that must be put into the right spots to make the sentences well-formed. Rather they are hot-buttons that set off rapid processes in the listening comprehension system of the host listener's brain. That is, the bits of grammar are quick and active, and sharper than a sword! A foreigner speaking Urdu, may tell a Pakistani something that begins with mera bhai, 'my brother'. Now he might well mean to say, "My brother, please help me!" But that is going to throw the host listener's processing system way off. That is because the a on the end of mera ('my') is one of those bits that is alive and active for the host listener, and dead as a door nail for the foreigner. So if I hear the foreigner say, "My brother, help me!" using mera with the a on the end, then it won't bother me at all, and I may understand the sentence more easily than the host person does. But for the host person, since the a is a hot button, and his comprehension system in his brain is getting contradictory cues. The a tells his listening system, "the speaker is going to comment about his brother--to give some new information about him". But then instead of saying something about his brother to the person he is addressing, the speaker asks the person for help. Confusing (ever so briefly). This is probably one reason sometimes foreigners can understand each other more easily than host people can understand them. You see, if the word for brother is not the subject of the sentence, then the possessive word for 'my' won't be mera but rather mere.  And that -e  is a different hot button. There are many more possibilities then how the rest of the sentence might be going to continue, but having the brother understood as the subject isn't one of them.

Well, you don't know Urdu, but my point is that the primary role of grammatical form and grammatical elements is to trigger processes in the comprehension system, not just so that you can have all the pieces in the right spot because that's how people like sentences to be.

A Pet Peeve of the GPA

Lots of people who call themselves "Vygotskyan" or "Sociocultural" won't like the GPA, any more than those who are labeled as "cognitivist".  Both share the commitment to the intuitively obvious fact that "What we did as schoolboys in Holland [or wherever] can't have been misguided."

For example, Dwight Atkinson, in the introduction to _Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition_  argues that "learners should indeed be presented with explicit and theoretically sophisticated explanations of L2 features..." which he feels is an application of sociocultural theory. Or Guy Cook, in his book on language play, largely concludes that supposedly discredited classic classroom approaches to language pedagogy are clearly defensible based on their alignment with what he expounds regarding the place of language play in everyday life. Well, this rising to defend tradition is all over the place. "Socioculturalists" are no exception.

The idea is that the first step in language learning is the successful participation in abstract, theoretical discourse (with concepts having names like "conjugation," "tense," "subjunctive," ...). To the extent that you're successful at that, you get to go on and "automatize" what you understood.

The GPA is the common person's approach! While we don't want to disadvantage intellectuals at all, neither do we want do disadvantage stay-at-home-mothers of four. I had a friend. She was a stay-at-home mother of four preschoolers. She had a book on her shelf about Hilbert Spaces that she had used when getting her M.A. in math. Later she got another M.A. in linguistics in a prominent linguistics department. But when she had those four preschoolers she told me, "I can't be intellectual right now." But "right now" was when she needed to be a growing participator! Yet I, like so many, thought that the pathway into another languacultural world began with a highly intellectual journey.

Glad that's over.

Where does "proper" speech come from?

Hi friends. Sorry I done been gone so long! I'm trying to write a manual for nurturers these days, and not doing so well, yet. So I won't be blogging so much for awhile.

I said I'd get back to my take on "proper speech". If you look at the planet, you'll find so many varieties of talking, some similar to one another (Trøndelag and Vestnorsk in Norway), some quite dissimilar (Warlpiri in Australia and Yanamamo in Venezuela and Brazil). Given the many thousands of ways of talking, what makes one way of talking superior to another, or as we say, "proper".

Well, everyone can agree that some ways of talking would be improper for relatively obviousl reasons (what is more often called inappropriate rather than improper) in certain contexts, both in terms of content and form. For example, meeting the Prime Minister, it would be improper to say, "Hello dearie. Whacha doin'? Are we getting enough resty westy to lead our little country wuntry?"

But most people, when they talk about "proper speech" are wondering about issues such as whether one "should" say "toward" or "towards". Where the "should" come from in such questions? How did the choice between "It is me" and "It is I" become a moral issue?

Well, I think it has to do with people claiming superiority over other people and having the wherewithal to impose that claim. Perhaps it was Joshua Fishman who spoke up to Max Weinreich from an audience and said something like "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (see Wikipedia). Whoever first said that, it has a lot of wisdom.

Within a region where there may be lots of similar varieties of talking, and if there is a sub-region that is more economically/politically/militarily powerful, then they get to say that proper speech is the way that they speak. (There will be other issues related to the development of their written variety.) If there is a school system there, this means that their children get educated from the beginning in their native speech variety, while other people's children look dumb to the teacher for speaking improperly. So in fact, the children from the "proper speech" region get a better education, more respect, more opportunities, and their sense special merit (moral, intellectual, etc.) gets reinforced by their advantages, which in term makes their speech sound more "proper," etc. in an ongoing cycle.

This is one way that people come to possess "proper speech" and others aspire to it, if the latter aspire to rising socially. Others rebellious souls may reject the whole system of superior and inferior humans, and signal this by speaking "improperly," with relish, for example using words like "ain't".

Now there are other issues, but they probably never get too far from the fact that one particular region or group of people who spoke or wrote in particular ways, claimed personal, intellectual, moral and/or religous superiority, and had the power to impose their claimed status on others.

And so we have the situation where for you, a growing participator looking out on your neighbours, none of the people whose practices you are being nurtured into speaks fully "properly", but shucks, from a moral perspective, they still feel ought to try to teach you the right way to talk. In fact, even if nobody talks "properly" anywhere in the world, foreigners ought to, because, well, that's what is right.

Which brings us back to some basic GPA principles: 1) It's not a language to be learned, but a life to be lived. (Look at what life is being lived. Don't be excluded from by accepting that you should talk differently from everyone else because that is "proper".) 2) Don't choose a language (or dialect), choose a people group. Growing participation is about a "them" (concrete people) not an "it" (an inanimate object called a "language" or worse yet "proper language").

Now, way down the road, as you keep participating, you'll gradually conform to ways of altering your speech variety based on setting and purpose. For now, however, just be an everyday person in everyday settings, even if you are meeting the Prime Minister. He'll understand that you are a newcomer and won't be surprised that you still talk in an everyday life manner, and in fact, you won't know how to use the special register for demeaning elderly people like me by talking to us in "baby talk" (as in "our little country wuntry"). Doing that will be a very advanced practice, and once you can engage in it, you you'll have enough host sense that you won't risk doing so inappropriately.

Correct grammar, decent behaviour, proper morals

As I help fellow growing participators, I am constantly confronted with common “folk theories” of language and language learning (which I meet in myself as well). I mean, we all live by means (mediation) of such folk theories in all areas of life. 

Recently I reread the article:

Miller, Laura & Ginsberg, Ralph B. (1995). “Folklinguistic Theories of Language Learning” by Laura Miller and Ralph B. Ginsberg. In Freed, Barbara F. Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context. Benjamins, pp. 293-316.

The notion of folk theories ties in with the topic of “cultural models” that has become increasingly important in the GPA.

As an example of a folk-theoretical assumption attributed to American students in Russia, Miller and Ginsberg cite the following: "...there is a correct version of Russian which they should strive to learn, [and] this prototype is a coherent logical system having fixed rules in which deviations are wrong (p. 300)."

Discourses about “proper (or good) grammar” and “proper speech” are fascinating--and challenging, as they must tap into issues like the moral values embedded in social group membership and intergroup relations. For the sake of those of us whose folk theories clash significantly with GPA assumptions, leading to small or great confusion, I want to dwell on this for a minute or more.

In connection with the assumption cited on p. 300, I would like to ask people, where is that correct version of Russian located at the moment? 

What makes it “good grammar” or “proper speech” to avoid widely spoken forms such as “ain’t” (even my spellchecker rejects “ain’t”, while accepting certain well-known vulgarities) or simple-past-tense “seen” as in “I seen him yesterday”. To question the reality of “good grammar” feels kinda like questioning the reality of "proper versus improper behaviour," maybe even questioning the existence of "good and evil" or of moral absolutes--linguists, like scientists in general, promoting moral relativism such as modifying their user-defined spell checking dictionaries to permit "ain't".

I hear an outcry coming from voices in my mind: “Are you saying good grammar isn't important?” “Looking at the compositions of college freshmen, it seems our school system has really failed a whole generation in terms of teaching them their own language.” “Let's get back to basics!” “Let's get tough on crime!” Etc. 

But my friends on the “right” (in the American sense of politically conservative) don’t have a monopoly on “proper-speech” realism. You may be an ardent activist in the National Rifle Association (“right”), and you may be an ardent activist in the American Civil Liberties Union (“left”). You can be on many sides of many moral issues. But you both agree without discussion that “I saw him,” is absolutely superior to “I seen him,” for reasons that indeed appear to assume a transcendent source of morality (a tacit assumption which may turn out to lurk behind any cases non-indifference to moral issues).

There are other ways of looking at matters like the contrast between “I saw him,” versus “I seen him,” in addition to mediation by unexamined folk theories. Linguists during the first two thirds of the twentieth century especially emphasized a distinction between “prescriptive grammar” and “descriptive grammar,” taking the latter to be their (scientific) concern, and leaving the former to schoolmarms/masters who didn’t know anything about linguistics anyway, and hence could not be expected to understand that the choice between “I saw him” and “I seen him” is arbitrary-- a matter of historical accidents.  But that leaves the schoolmarms/masters defending the distinction between right and wrong, while scientists (linguists in this case) promote their expected moral relativism.

(Interestingly, though, if Miller and Ginsberg are right, then when linguists and other scholars get down to discussing language learning issues, they are in many ways influenced by the same folk theories that influence the general public.)

Sociolinguists (arising in the 1960s and 70s) might be considered a lot more helpful in the present connection than descriptive linguists, since they find rhyme and reason in a distinction such as “I saw him” versus “I seen him”. Not just arbitrary accidents of history, but social driven developments. This lets us deconstruct the notion of “proper speech” in ways that give us a richer, “scientific" story, thus helping to locate moral issues in matters such as class struggle and colonialism. “Proper speech” is now about prestige. Prestige markers may consist in the quality of a vowel or consonant as well as combinations of morphemes, word choices, etc. You don’t need a lot of these linguistic social markers to do the job of keeping straight who is whom when you hear someone speak (that is, marking the speaker's identity in terms of group membership), but for the social markers in speech to work well, people need to have a strongly inculcated sense that, for example, saying “It wasn’t he,” locates one a higher social (and moral or immoral, depending on your perspective) rung than saying “It wasn’t him.” Similarly, a strongly developed sense of speech-and-social-identity applies in reverse on over the trucker's CB radio or on the construction site, where "double negatives" (ain't got no beer) carry the same “covert prestige" as accounts of one’s drunken and/or sexual antics last weekend. Gradually the tables may turn, as new generations become sensitized to the hypocrisy of “posh” ways of sounding (such as saying, “It wasn’t he.”) Even then, the historical moral superiority of “posh” speech may continue to shine through, as it continues to be favoured by clergy (and academic stuffed shirts on the political right, left and centre). 

Folk theories/cultural models of language and language learning hit us growing participators on the home front and on the host front. I bring with me my home languaculture’s story-making pieces such as “proper grammar”. Such understandings are part of my “foreign accent” (which exists not only on the level of my pronunciation, but in every aspect of my growing participation). On the host front, the host people who nurture me will bring their own folk theories/cultural models in the areas of language and language teaching/learning. As in general, being nurtured into host practices is a long, many-year process, and never entails that I come to share all host beliefs! However, whether I come to share them or not, coming to understand host cultural models is necessary to coming to understanding host action in general. Suppose I’m being nurtured into an Anglo languacultural world where the story-making-pieces-of-life include, “proper speech” (related to “proper behaviour” in general) and/or “posh speech” and/or "one-of-the-boys' speech". As a growing participator, at the least, I’ll want to eventually mediate my listening to host people by means of my knowing these host pieces of life.

Next time, I’ll share a bit of my "objectivist" personal take on the matter of "proper grammar" and its relationship to growing participation (informed by folk theories and by scientific Discourses--including my folk-theoretical false-confidence in scientism and opposing, antiscientistic Discourses).

"Tenses" Part 3

Keep that in mind, then, that when GPs panic because they aren’t being taught “past, present and future,” during the first week, it is because their folk-theory of language tells them that they are missing one of the main details of any language. But in fact, they may be trying to jump ahead three or four hundred hours!

Our own experience is that abilities that GPs have in comprehension at Phase X will become common in their production ability at Phase X + 1 (even from the beginning of Phase X+1):

Phase 1 (100 hours): comprehend here-&-now tense-aspect-mood

Phase 2 (150 hours): comprehend story-event tense-aspect-mood; produce here&now tense-aspect-mood

Phase 3 (250 hours): Produce story-event tense-aspect-mood; comprehend story-backgrounding tense-aspect (He was drinking his coffee when…)

Phase 4 (500 hours): Produce story-backgrounding tense-aspect-mood; Understand expository and argumentative discourse.

Phase 5 (500 hours): Produce expository and argumentative discourse.

This does not mean that there will be no experience whatsoever with “story-event tense-aspect-mood,” for example, “past tense” in Phases 1 and 2. Linguists talk about the inherent lexical semantics of verbs, for example, “burst” is inherently a brief event, not stretching out over time. (Other examples are “jab”,” “strike [a match],” “fall”.) In the here-and-now, you can’t typically describe something in the process of bursting because the event happens too suddenly and quickly to allow time to discuss it while it is underway. (Well, you can describe something that is in the process of bursting if it is in a still picture—such as a picture of a dam bursting.) With such verbs, a GP, like a host baby, may primarily hear them, and hence primarily know them, them in their story-event form (in English that is the simple past tense). Or consider what linguists call “habitual aspect” (and English teachers call them, ever-so-misleadingly, “simple present”). Such verb forms might naturally belong to Phase 3 comprehension and Phase 4 production, since they involve a type of “backgrounding” tense/aspect. However with “stative” verbs such as “live” (Jean lives in France), and “know,” (Jean knows French) again, GPs, like host babies may most frequently hear them in this aspect.

So the point is not that GPs following the Six-Phase Programme have no experience with, say, “past tense” in listening comprehension before Phase 2, nor with past tense production before Phase 3. Lots of more advanced grammatical riches are going to be there all along. GPs become aware of them to varying degrees before their time. Think of English “the” and “a” which are extremely common even in Phase 1 listening, and probably come into production already a little bit, even in Phase 1B. Yet most GPs will still not use them in fully host-like ways (in listening comprehension, and hence also in speaking) even in Phase 6.

If the nurturer were a teacher, she might have a list of all the grammatical content she’d want to make GPs master. Based on the common folk theory of language in the Anglophone world, then “Past, present and future” will be high on her list of grammar points to teach as early as possible, and she’ll try to get the GPs to master “the tenses” and to display their mastery as early as possible.

However, a nurturer is not a teacher. A nurturer is just including you in her languacultural world, and helping you to do what you’re trying to do as you continue to develop and change. In Phase 1 and Phase 2 GPs aren’t generally trying to tell stories, and so the nurturer won’t be helping them to form “past-tense” verbs very often. Those GPs will naturally be trying to supply “past-tense” forms a lot in Phase 3, and hence the nurturer will naturally be helping them a lot with this in Phase 3.

I haven’t been talking about “future tense,” but as “past tense” goes with narrative, with story telling, “future tense” may come into play when we share plans or undertake commitments, right? GPs can expect to hear such forms in dialogues between characters in Phase 2 stories that they help build, or in vocalisation of the thoughts of characters. In Phase 3 GPs should be interacting with host people quite a lot outside of supercharged participation, and naturally talking about plans, and undertaking commitments.

In terms of the US FSI/ILR levels, “future” is placed with “past” at proficiency level 2 (720 hours).

Forms that are more naturally encountered in expository discourse (you might hear grammar terms like “subjunctive” and “conditional” and “irrealis”) will come in large quantities by Phase 4 and 5.

Languacultures differ much in all of these areas. In Urdu, some of the more advanced forms (subjunctive and counterfactual conditional) are truncations of less advanced forms (future and habitual, respectively). So they aren’t that hard to form, but they still come in their own time in terms of comprehending and producing them, because the speech genres that are rich in them are difficult to understand and produce until the GP is fairly far along.

In much of life, most GPs will be speaking a “personal pidgin” (a term I learned from anthropologist Robbins Burling) in early phases. In English, you’ll hear things like “I go to store” (used for “I went to the store,” and “I’m going to go to the store.”) Personal pidgins really work, and the personal pidgin stage really is a stage we need to pass through. The only path to host-sounding speech lies across a large terrain of strange-sounding speech.

At the point when you find yourself trying to produce a grammatical form which you previously were comprehending, then the GPA advocates special effort, in a “just-in-time” spirit. Nurturers and other host people help GPs to do what they are currently trying to do in natural communication—not more advanced forms. This sometimes called “focus on form” as opposed to the common teachers’ style of “focus on formS.” The latter ignores what the students are and are not currently trying to do in their own spontaneous speaking efforts. The GPA encourages focusing on form through structured input, input flooding, output flooding, and record-yourself-for feedback, but probably pre-eminently, in the constant process of conversation between the GPs and nurturer, in which the GP struggles and the nurturer scaffolds. Our “grammar-awareness raising” strategies begin, of course, in Phase 1, with input floods and structured input, and the later grammar awareness raising activities, like record-yourself-for feedback, can be used in an ongoing way, even in Phase 6.

Note: If you have received LLA training, but find you have forgotten terms like “structured input” then you need to come again! Non-memory of “structured input” could be the tip of an iceberg of non-memory!

"Tenses" Part 2

Continuing…

For any one languaculture, the issues related to tense and aspect can be complex indeed, with one-many, many-one and many-many relationships between form and function, and with tense and aspect interacting with other areas, such as mood, case marking and person and number agreement. If we look across languacultures, the complexities become astronomical. The GPA reacts against turning “language learning” into a feat of intellectual prowess. We want to give the recently retired, lifelong homemaker the same opportunity as the recently graduated medical doctor or engineer (or linguist). In any case, in the GPA and Six Phase Programme, we don’t have “grammar goals” that are independent of the normal pattern of growing participation in the practices of host people, which includes increasingly talking the way they talk.

In Phase 1, the primary speech that is in the GP’s growth zone is speech about the here-and-now (which is why we call Phase 1 the Here-and-Now Phase). Now if we wanted to talk about it in grammatical terms, then we might expect terms such as “present progressive,” “stative” and “imperative”. We meet such forms in great abundance (an “input flood”) first in listening comprehension, and later in spoken production.

In Phase 2A, there is a natural sequence forward. First, the GPs and nurturer describe the contents of pages of a picture story book using the here-and-now forms that are already familiar from Phase 1, using verb after verb after verb, including many verbs that are first encountered in Phase 2A. By the time the GPs and nurturer reach the end of the first picture story, the story’s verbs, in their here-and-now forms, are old friends. When the nurturer then retells the whole book, not a description of the separate pages, but rather, for the first time as a story, using the story-event forms of verbs, there will be a powerful new flood of those story-event forms. The “past tense” (or whatever is used to mark events in stories) will have been born in the comprehension systems of the GPs. It needs a chance to grow and become strong.

In Phase 2B, the sequence of activities begins with the nurturer’s story already in the “past tense” (or whatever the story-event form is). In many host languacultures, though, we find that when it is the GPs’ turn to “retell” the story that the nurturer first told, and that they subsequently massaged together, the GPs can do pretty well at describing the pages, but not at telling the story as a true story. Describing the pages in the “here-and-now” is all we expect them to be able to do.  (And to think, people panic over the question, “Why aren’t we learning the past tense?” in Phase 1A).

I can say this with some confidence based on extensive findings that underlie the US government’s  FSI/ILR Proficiency levels. Level 1 proficiency is primarily tied to “present tense,” while the ability to “narrate,” belongs to Level 2 (which means it might be underway somewhat in Level 1+). On the average, reaching Level 1 proficiency in typical languages takes 480 contact hours (480 hours of supercharged participation). Reaching Level 2 takes a total of 720 contact hours. So consistent narrative ability comes after 720 hours of supercharged participation activities and in the Six Phase Programme, that would mean nearly half way through Phase 4. Nevertheless, story-telling ability evolves gradually, and so in Phase 3, when the flood of “past tense” (etc.) forms had turned into a torrent, GPs will try, with the nurturer’s help as needed, to retell the nurturer’s complex and textured stories in a bare event-chain-form story, using the story-event form verbs in their own speech in an “output flood”.

Again, the GPA doesn't follow a grammar-driven agenda, but rather certain families of word forms (or other grammatical cues) come into playwith force --often as "input floods"--as the GP comes to participate in new forms of discourse through the six phases. Grammar is not a set of instructions for forming well-formed sentences, but rather a set of cues in the speech stream, and appropriate reactions to those cues, during the listening comprehension process. Grammatical details are comprehension cues. Production mechanisms, on the other hand, aim to provide the cues that comprehension system looks for. 

As GPs struggle to express themselves in host-like ways at their current level of discourse, and as their nurturers aid them, they will gain momentum in forming sentences that sound more-and-more host-like. If they like lots of Greek and Latin-laden terminology, like "deontic and epistemic modalities," that is fine. If they freeze up with grammar anxiety when they hear terms like "noun and verb," that's OK, too. The changing discourses of the Six-Phase Programme will lead to increasing familiarity with how host people talk, and the GPs' interactions with host people will draw them more and more into the host practices. More and more, I said. Almost certainly less than all the way. Probably a lot less!

"Tenses" (as in past, present and future). Part 1

I’ll soon be writing some morsels on the GPA Facebook page on the cognitive dimension of the GPA. Suffice it to say, for the GPA, “grammar” is not “instructions for how to form sentences” but part of a “cue system” which is used by the “comprehension system” in the process of converting sound into understanding.

“Past-present-future tense” is a powerful theme in our Anglo-world folk-theory of language and language learning. When people want to do a “modified GPA,” one of the common concerns will be, “The GPA doesn’t teach past, present and future in Phase 1, and that’s really basic”. If you ask, you’ll find we have something to say about every area in which there are common complaints/misunderstanding! So this message explains some of the reasoning behind the way “tense” is dealt with in the GPA.

First a bit of terminology: Tense, Aspect, Mood (TAM)

1)   I am writing this blog entry

2)   I was writing this blog entry

3)   I wrote this blog entry

Sentences 2) and 3) are said to be past tense. They differ in aspect. Sentences 1) and 2) are progressive aspect (which is a type of imperfective aspect). I hope that gives you a bit of an idea of the basic distinction between tense and aspect. When it comes to mood or major concern is with imperative and interrogative, but we won’t dwell on mood now.

A problem in talking about TAM is that all our examples are in English, which uses such categories in particular combinations, for particular purposes. As we are really talking about many languacultures, we need to be more general, and so we talk of “tense,” meaning tense and aspect. Sentence 1) is here-and-now “tense” (or we might say, here-and-now tense-aspect). Sentence 3) has what we will call story-event “tense” and sentence 2) has what we will call story-background “tense”.

Note that we put "tense" in quotation marks. The realities of languages will differ greatly. For example, in the imperative there might be a contrast, which we don’t have in English, between imperfective (“Be writing a blog!”) and perfective (“Write a blog!”). Some language may not have tense, that is, using a particular aspect for the story-event form. Some languages have hodiernal tense (past, but still today), pre-hesternal (past, and prior to yesterday), etc. Lots of different aspects, too, in the languages of the world. Huge variety, and all sorts of complexities.  The “quotation marks” around "tense" are there to remind you that I’m using the term in a vague, everyday way that reflects our Anglophone-world folk-theory of language and language learning.

It seems that in the SLA (second language acquisition) field, few researchers get beyond thinking of “tense” as a way of referring to a “location in time”. A common idea is that initially “language learners” express time by adverbs, such as “yesterday,” before they learn to refer to “locations” in time by tense marking.

In my dissertation, I observed the oddity of practice, by lingusits (influenced by a certain logician),  of viewing tense/aspect marking as a way of expressing the fact that the “Event Time” preceeds vs. coincides vs. follows the “Speech Act Time”. If someone is telling a typical story, then all the events in the story precede the speech act times. So why mark that fact on every single verb. Yet historically, a language without past tense marking will develop it, perhaps over several centuries (this is called grammaticisation). It seems to be doing something more important than (totally redundantly) reminding us that each event in the story happened before the time when the story is being told.

Some linguists, such as Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson have proposed that “past tense” (etc.) marking has a different function. It marks the “foreground” events—that is the events that move the story forward. Some psychologists have understood this concept of moving the story forward in terms of “mental models”. As we hear a story, we have a mental model that keeps changing, developing in line with the events of the story. Daniel Morrow had people listen to two versions of a story. One had the words, “John walked through the kitchen into the bedroom.” The other had the words, “John was walking through the kitchen into the bedroom.” These differ in terms of aspect, perfective (walked) versus progressive (was walking). The effect of the “simple past” (the perfective) in the first case is a mental model in which John is in the bedroom now. The effect of the progressive is a mental model in which John is now in the living room. The effect of tense/aspect then is to move us to a particular place in the story line.

Now whereas it makes no sense that languages would have a great tendency to mark the time of every event in a story (prior to the Speech Act Time, etc.) when that is so obvious, it makes excellent sense that the tense/aspect morphology would help people understand where we are in the story.

I would argue that in general the “time reference” of tense marking is incidental. For example, “future tense” is in fact marking speech act types such as making a commitment to do something. Of course, whatever you commit to do, you will do it in the future.

To be continued…