Question regarding obligatory contexts of tense morphemes in story retells

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Katya,

    My own opinion is that there will be many sentences in narratives  for which it is not possible to determine obligatory context.  If the sentence includes a temporal adverbial such as "yesterday", then an obligatory context is clearly established.  However, it is not possible in the general case to assume that all verbs in a story should be in the past tense.  One can switch temporal perspective to join into the flow of a past action, treating it as if it were a narration of an ongoing activity.  This is a stylistic choice and one might want to assume that it is not available to learners, but I rather doubt that.  In addition, there are other reasons to shift to the present, such as when one describes the habitual functionality of something, as in "the oar only fits into the slot, if you push at an angle".  You have to put this into the present, even if the overall story is in the past.  Furthermore, if you are looking for the morpheme on the main verb, you have to remember that in the past progressive, it shifts to the auxiliary or modal.  But then, do you really want to treat the past progressive as equivalent to the simple past, thereby ignoring verb-specific effects?  
  
   Regarding the 3rd person present marker, the tense issues are roughly parallel, although there is the additional issue of person-number agreement in that case.  However, unless subjects are omitted, that is usually pretty clear.

   Computation of obligatory context is a core problem in the rich literature on the Aspect Hypothesis in both L1 and L2 learning.   I do believe that one could eventually devise a system that reduced the range of these problems, but it would require attention specifically to this issue rather than simply taking some known coding system off the shelf.  I would be more than happy to have info-childes readers correct me on this.

--  Brian MacWhinney, Psychology CMU

On Mar 9, 2010, at 12:08 PM, Katya wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> What will be the best way to determine obligatory contexts for the
> past tense morpheme -ed and the present 3rd person singular morpheme –
> s in story retells of children learning English as a second language?
> 
> I suppose in the strictest sense, the whole story should be in the
> past tense. Many children, however, use the present tense correctly in
> the story retell situation, perhaps as a sociolinguistic result of
> their past storytelling experiences or perhaps from storytelling
> tense transfer from their native language, Spanish. Then there are the
> kids that will switch between the two tenses throughout their retell.
> This is particularly difficult because if they use both morphemes in
> one sample and then proceed to omit the tense morpheme in a certain
> utterance, it is hard to determine what tense morpheme they are
> omitting.
> 
> Overall, should the context be determined by the whole language sample
> or at the sentence level?
> 
> Any suggestions would be helpful,
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Katya
> 
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