Wednesday 28 May 2014

System Approached ‘From Above’: Tense

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 28):
tense — group: traditionally a mixture, because the model was taken over from Latin with richer word-rank realisations than English, but more recently in this [20th] century often a word category, past/non-past; reinterpreted (relative to this) as (i) past/present/future and (ii) recursive, with secondary tense.