Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2003 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Komparatistik, Note: 1,00, Freie Universit t Berlin (Institut f r Englische Philologie), Veranstaltung: Understanding English-German Contrasts, 28 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Within the last two decades many attempts have been made to define a generally accepted concept of universal temporal and aspectual systems. There are comprehensive studies about the grammatical functions of tense and aspect, their categories and their meaning. In regard to their tense systems, English and German show amazing parallels in the inventory of forms but there are major differences in their use and function. The following paper gives an overview of English and German tense and aspect systems and presents traditional and current theories and controversies on them. Moreover, an attempt will be made to discuss in detail function and use of the perfect, future and progressive construction in these two languages.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar I: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: As English and German are both Germanic languages they are closely related. However, there are still a lot of differences to be found when comparing the two languages. This is among other things due to the fact that English and German represent different language types. Among the grammatical categories relating to which the two languages can be analysed, tense and aspect are certainly salient. Before starting to analyse both languages with regard to these categories, the difference between tense and aspect has to be clarified. Tense is both a deictic and a relational category. Therefore it locates an event on the time line usually with reference to the time of speaking. Aspect, by contrast, does not locate an event or situation on the time line nor does it relate the time of one situation to another. It is rather concerned with "the internal temporal constituency of one situation". This term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use and expression of tense and aspect taking the perspective of a learner. First the three stages of tense and aspect acquisition by learners will be described in general terms. Particular attention will be paid to the influence of instruction on the learners. Then this term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use of tense. This will be illustrated on the example of the different uses of the perfect. Afterwards the focus will be on aspect. While English uses the progressive to indicate a change of aspect, there is no such formal equivalent in the German language. Therefore German learners of English are confronted with the question of how to express this "internal constituency of one situation" in their mother tongue. Various devices that are used by German learners of

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar I: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: As English and German are both Germanic languages they are closely related. However, there are still a lot of differences to be found when comparing the two languages. This is among other things due to the fact that English and German represent different language types. Among the grammatical categories relating to which the two languages can be analysed, tense and aspect are certainly salient. Before starting to analyse both languages with regard to these categories, the difference between tense and aspect has to be clarified. Tense is both a deictic and a relational category. Therefore it locates an event on the time line usually with reference to the time of speaking. Aspect, by contrast, does not locate an event or situation on the time line nor does it relate the time of one situation to another. It is rather concerned with “the internal temporal constituency of one situation”. This term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use and expression of tense and aspect taking the perspective of a learner. First the three stages of tense and aspect acquisition by learners will be described in general terms. Particular attention will be paid to the influence of instruction on the learners. Then this term paper will examine how English and German differ in their use of tense. This will be illustrated on the example of the different uses of the perfect. Afterwards the focus will be on aspect. While English uses the progressive to indicate a change of aspect, there is no such formal equivalent in the German language. Therefore German learners of English are confronted with the question of how to express this “internal constituency of one situation” in their mother tongue. Various devices that are used by German learners of English to express the progressive will be exemplified. Both the section on tense and the section on the progressive will conclude with a focus on the difficulties for and the typical errors made by the learners. However, as there is no material available concerning English learners of German, only the German learners of English will be taken into account.

The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, and suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework. They compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones.

The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, and suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework. They compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones.

This book presents the latest developments in crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and multilingualism research. The contributors, both veteran researchers and relative newcomers to the field, situate their research in current debates in terms of theory and data analysis and they present it in an accessible way. The chapters investigate how and when native and non-native language knowledge is used in language production. They focus on lexis, syntax, tense-aspect, phonology of multilingual production and link it to a range of concepts such as redundancy, affordances, metalinguistic awareness and L2 status. The empirical data have been collected from participants with a wide combination of languages: besides English, German, French and Spanish, there is Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Chinese and Catalan.

This book offers an introduction to the derivation of meaning that is accessible and worked out to facilite an understanding of key issues in compositional semantics. The syntactic background offered is generative, the major semantic tool used is set theory. These tools are applied step-by-step to develop essential interface topics and a selection of prominent contrastive topics with material from English and German.