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когнитивная грамматика и методика обучения английскому языку как иностранному: дело о «временах»
А.В. КРАВЧЕНКО
cognitive grammar and efl methodology: THE CAsE for «tenses»
A.V. KRAVCHENKO
Описывается когнитивный подход к обучению русскоговорящих учащихся английским временам в рамках когнитивной теории времени и вида (КТВВ). Показывается, как значение и функционирование так называемых времен могут быть осмыслены относительно лежащих в их основе когнитивных структур; эти структуры укоренены в чувственном опыте и одинаковы в обоих языках. Дается краткий обзор обычных трудностей, с которыми сталкиваются учащиеся при овладении «временами», и предлагается простой трехшаговый алгоритм выбора правильной формы времени в дискурсе. Предлагаемый подход позволяет радикальным образом улучшить процесс освоения грамматики.
Ключевые слова когнитивная грамматика, наблюдатель, чувственная контексту-ализированность, вид.
A cognitive approach to instructed acquisition of English tenses by the speakers of Russian is described in the framework of a cognitive theory of tense and aspect (CTTA). It is argued that the meaning and function of the so-called tenses may be understood in relation to the underlying cognitive structures rooted in perceptual experience, which are similar in both languages. The usual stumbling blocks in the acquisition of «tenses» are summed up, and a simple three-step procedure is offered for choosing a correct tense in discourse. The suggested approach allows to dramatically improve the process of grammar acquisition.
Keywords: cognitive grammar, observer, perceptual groundedness, aspect.
1. Introduction
Despite extensive ongoing research in modern theoretical linguistics, particularly research driven by the cognitive science agenda - to discover, by studying language, how the mind works - there is still a disparity of ends and means as far as different aspects of linguistic education go. Specifically, classroom practices in such areas as SLA, TESOL, EFL continue to rely on traditional methodologies passed on from the previous generations of educators, paying little heed to whatever theoretical insights cognitive science can offer. And this is understandable, too.
In spite of the common agenda pursued by cognitive linguists, theoretical frameworks characteristic of particular schools of cognitivism often differ considerably in their initial assumptions about the nature of the relationship between mind and body, and between language and mind. While orthodox cognitivism of the Chomskian brand views intelligence as disembodied and symbolic, «second generation» cognitive science emphasizes the embodiment of mind [1-2]. Proponents of the embodied mind approach, while admitting that we are coupled to the world through our embodied interactions, focus on the study of neuronal mechanisms in the brain as a key to understanding the biological nature of language and mind [3]. Both approaches are essentially internalist: they view cogni-
tion as autonomous activity within the (embodied) brains of cognizers which generates input/output capacity [4]. Thus the external aspect of cognition manifested in language as perceptually guided adaptive interactions of living systems with the environment [5] is underestimated.1 This is, probably, one of the major reasons why to an applied linguist, such as a TESOL/EFL teacher, cognitive explorations of language remain, mostly, of purely theoretical interest, having little to offer by way of effectively resolving applied linguistic tasks such as instructed language acquisition.
As an example, Ron Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar [7-10] is an interesting and theoretically insightful account of cognitive processing reflected in linguistic structure. Yet, to meet the requirement of “serious” theoretical framework, it uses an elaborate system of graphic schemata and notations called upon to facilitate understanding of the offered explanation. However, to comprehend the system itself requires not a minor cognitive effort, thus undermining the practical utility of the entire framework. No wonder, that despite becoming quite popular as a theoretical framework, Langacker’s approach has not found its way into standard EFL classroom practices, and the majority of descriptive grammars used by EFL teachers continue to rely on the “good old” semantic approach in elucidating the intricacies of the English grammar.
I am not going to advocate for Langacker’s approach to grammar. Although sympathetic to his attempts to explain the cognitive mechanisms of grammar, I don’t believe in pragmatic utility of complex formalizations and schemata in the context of instructed foreign language acquisition. To become functionally fluent in their mother tongue, children don’t build formal schemata in their mind on which their performance is modeled. Natural language acquisition is perceptually grounded and context driven; taking this into account may facilitate a better understanding on the part of the student of how grammar works.
However, traditional semantic explanations offered by descriptive grammars are to a large degree the result of “rationalizing” language by influential philosophers and mathematicians, rather than naturalizing it. Taking mathematics and formal logic to be the lodestone for testing the “correctness” of linguistic expressions, they have imposed certain rules on “good” grammar as a feature of an educated person, which is opposed to “informal” grammar of the vernacular. Suffice it to mention the notorious double negation rule imposed on English grammar by the bishop Robert Lowth [11]. This rule, despite strict insistence on the part of English language teachers, continues to be defied in everyday use by native speakers, and triple, and even quadruple negation is not uncommon in the speech of educated people, cf.:
(1) I ain’t tellin ’nobody nothin ’ no way.
Another remarkable trace left in grammar by a philosopher of science is an account of the meaning and function of the English tenses offered by Hans Reichenbach [12], which has been used by linguists ever since in describing tenses. The model is built on the linear relationships between “speech time”, “event time” and “reference time” along the so-called “time axis”. However, the model is flawed with an inconsistency which, as was shown by Hoepelmann [13], results in a logical paradox.2
1 As a commendable effort to make up for this, see [6].
2 A detailed critique of Reichenbach>s model was given by Kravchenko [14].
Theoretical considerations aside, anyone with at least some experience of learning English in an educational setting outside the target language environment will agree that to speakers of other languages (especially, non-Germanic, such as Slavic) one of the most difficult and baffling parts of the English grammar is everything related to the verb, its forms, and functions. Having taught EFL for over 30 years, I know only far too well what it takes to achieve the level of grammatical competence on the part of even the best student that would enable him to use all the so-called English tenses appropriately in different types of discourse situations. As a typical example, the difference in meaning and reference between the Past Simple and the Present Perfect is something that eludes comprehension for many speakers of Russian. Furthermore, the process of grammar acquisition is from the start hindered by the cognitive hurdle presented by the sheer number of English tenses. Just because in Russian schools students are taught that there are three tenses in Russian (present, past, and future), they are baffled, sometimes forever, by the twelve “tenses” in English, not counting Future-in-the Past and the passive forms. That is, if they follow the explanatory logic of the traditional semantic approach.
In what follows, I will give a brief summary of the problems EFL learners face in regard to tense acquisition, showing how traditional grammars fail to provide lucid explanations of the differences in meaning and function of the various tenses. Then, I will argue that the orthodox rationalist approach is incapable of offering a relatively simple framework for treating the problem of tenses because of deep misconceptions about language and grammar, labeled by Roy Harris [15] as the “language myth”, and offer a cognitive approach based on the experiential nature of meaning and perceptual groundedness of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect, promoted by the Cognitive Theory of Tense and Aspect. I will conclude by highlighting the advantage of CTTA approach in tense-aspect acquisition over the traditional semantic approach.
2. Where the traditional approach comes short
What are the usual stumbling blocks in the EFL classroom in regard to tenses? The following is a list of common problems encountered by many EFL students.
I. The choice between the past simple and the present perfect, as illustrated by (2):
(2) a. George, you look different from when I saw you last. Did you get a new haircut or something?
b. Look at George! He’s got a new haircut!
Traditional grammars of different formats are not particularly explicit about the rules or mechanisms governing the choice in each case. The best they can do is offer some sort of guidelines which, allegedly, should help arrive at the right decision, for instance, by drawing the student’s attention to specific adverbials that are often preferentially used in one case or the other, such as yesterday, last month, and the like for the past simple, or recently, already, ever, etc. for the present perfect [16 - 19]. Note, however, that neither the past simple nor the present perfect verb is accompanied by any such lexical markers in the above examples. As a matter of fact, they seldom are in everyday oral discourse. Yet native speakers do not hesitate which tense to choose. What is it that they “know” that helps them do that?
The answer is simple, though many grammars, following the descriptivist’s belief of long ago, have tried to obscure it (quite unintentionally, to be sure) by stating that the (present) perfect refers to past events (for some recent examples see [19-22]. This is very misleading in the case of instructed grammar acquisition for the very simple reason that the perfect is ‘a kind of present tense’ form (cf. [23-25]). Consider the following examples discussed by Anderson:
(3) a. The English produced few great sculptors (in the nineteenth century).
b. The English have produced few great sculptors.
(4) a. The Hittites produced few great sculptors.
b. *The Hittites have produced few great sculptors.
Whereas we can speak of formal choice in (3) (although in actual discourse it isn’t, naturally, an issue for a native speaker who knows exactly what he is speaking about, that is, whether he is speaking about the past or the present), there can be no choice whatsoever in (4), because it is well known that the Hittites as a people belong to the history of long ago and not to the present time.
But if the perfect is a kind of present, how does it differ from other present forms, such as the simple and the progressive? Traditional grammars don’t seem to have a coherent answer.
II. The choice between the past simple and the past perfect, as illustrated by (5):
(5) a. The villagers returned to their homes after the gang left the place.
b. The villagers returned to their homes after the gang had left the place.
Traditional grammars usually do not go beyond admitting that either tense is possible in such cases, but they do not explain the difference (cf. [21]). And there must be a difference, for were it not so, one of the structures would become obsolete and drop out of use, perfectly in keeping with the functional law of language: if two different forms exist simultaneously, they each possess and express a different meaning. Analyzing the following example:
(6) She told me his name after he had left
Salkie [26] points out that the use of the past perfect suggests that she deliberately waited until he was out of the room before revealing his name, while the use of the simple past (...after he left) does not. However, what accounts for this meaning conveyed by the past perfect, remains unexplained.
Salkie also stresses that the choice of either the past simple or the past perfect in some cases is context sensitive, as in (7) where the simple past in place of the past perfect would appear odd:
(7) He died after he had been ill for a long time.
Moreover, the typical guidelines for the choice of the past perfect, rather than the past simple, found in grammar books involve reference to temporal sequencing of events of which one precedes the other in time. This does not help at all in the cases when the very first sentence, say, in a book, begins with a verb in the past perfect - such as illustrated by (8):
(8) She had suspected the truth all along. Not that it really mattered now. Or ever would to anybody but herself...
What temporal sequencing of events one can speak of in this case remains unclear. Consequently, one would not expect an EFL student to be capable of producing a text similar to (8), although it is hardly a problem for a native speaker/writer.
III. The choice between the present perfect and the present perfect progressive, as illustrated by (9):
(9) a. We have lived in New York since 1990.
b. We have been living in New York since 1990.
According to Leech and Svartvik [27], the present perfect progressive has the same sort of meaning as the present perfect, except that the period leading up to the present has limited duration. According to Close [28], there may be no difference at all between such sentences, although the present perfect progressive may convey the idea of a temporary arrangement which may be changed. According to Murphy [29], both tenses can be used for actions repeated over a long period, as in (10):
(10) a. I’ ve collected stamps since I was a child.
b. I’ve been collecting stamps since I was a child.
As may be seen, such accounts leave room for uncertainty which leads to a random choice of a particular tense on the part of the EFL student.
IV Constraints on the use of certain types of verbs in the progressive tenses
There is one thing a student of English is sure to find in any grammar book that all authors seem to agree upon. It is the explicit direction not to use verbs of perception and cognition, such as see, hear, smell, know, remember, understand, state verbs such as like,
love, hate, etc., as well as relational verbs, such as be, have, contain, cost, etc. in the pro-
gressive (cf. [20; 30 - 32]). True, it is noted in the same books that sometimes such verbs can be used in the progressive, but the provided explanations (“change of meaning”, “specific reference”, the distinction between a “stative” and an “active meaning” of the same verb, etc.) do not seem to be particularly helpful because they do not give a single simple criterion for deciding whether the verb should be used in the progressive or not. On the other hand, very common verbs like hate, hope, like, remember, etc. are “so often found used in the progressive tenses that it must seem far-fetched, indeed impossible,
to describe them as ‘non-progressive’” [33: 181] (also see [34]). Consider J0rgensen’s
examples in (11) and (12):
(11) Watching the two men, Roger’s attention had gradually been riveted on what
he was seeing, what he was hearing. (J.Creasey. Send Superintendent West, Pan, 1965, p. 77).
(12) No, it’s the first time I’ve been out of England. And I’m loving every moment of it. (J. M. Ward, My Head on a Plate (in British and American English, Longmans, 1961, p. 51)).
Note, that for a native linguistically unsophisticated speaker the simple tense in (11) and (12) would be anywhere between strange and unacceptable.
Clearly, in all the above examples the choices made by a native speaker are never random, but determined by the subtle difference in meaning many grammar books fail to explicate. This is true about practically any grammar book in any language written by a native speaker for a target audience whose native language is different from the author’s and the latter does not speak it. Yet I do not make a preposterous claim that English linguists who write grammars for speakers of other languages do not know their own native tongue, or that their grammatical competence should be questioned. I only want to emphasize that the traditional methodology for semantic analysis, especially in tense grammar, is bound to come short of explaining what cannot be explained on rationalist premises in principle. Despite an immense literature on the English verb and its grammatical categories, there is a profound lack of theoretical insights on the matter that could elucidate the general principles underlying the grammatical build-up of the verb. It is therefore not surprising that descriptive grammars’ attempts to explain what has not been satisfactorily understood in theoretical grammars, more often than not turn futile. For that matter, linguistics, both theoretical and applied, needs a new methodology that would enable to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional semantic approach (cf. [35]).
3. A Cognitive Approach
3.1. Language and grammar
By and large, the applied problem outlined above stems from the theoretical tangle in which tense-aspect studies - and, broadly, grammatical theory (see [36]) - find themselves today. Paradoxically, despite a long history and an immense amount of research done in the field, theoretical linguists do not seem capable of offering a relatively simple framework for treating the categories of tense and aspect in a manner comprehensible to a linguistically unsophisticated person (for that is what most of the users of descriptive grammars, or EFL students, are). My claim is that this is due to deeply ingrained misconceptions about language, or the language myth.
Because of the written language bias in linguistics [37], the concept of grammar as the setting of procedures (rules) for organizing words and morphemes into larger units is misleading. By confusing natural language as a kind of communicative behavior integrated in the complex dynamics of human cognition with writing as symbolic representations of physical words which are orientational devices used in dialogical interactions in real space-time, orthodox linguistics makes a categorical mistake of viewing regularities in the use of written signs as rules which underlie the use of natural language. Not surprisingly, little progress has been made in applying the theory of grammar thus conceived to solving practical tasks, such as foreign or second language acquisition.
Language is a salient feature of human cognition, it extends our sensorium [38] in interactions with the environment by virtue of being a consensual domain of interactions [39]. Far from being symbols, natural linguistic signs are indices that cue human understanding in communication with regard to its physical context, particularly, to the (speaking) observer as the ultimate point-of-reference [40]. These cuing aspects of linguistic signs underlie grammatical meaning ‘expressed’ in grammatical categories as meta-signs, and help establish a second-order consensual domain [41], in which communicating individuals orient one another in regard to their first-order consensual domains. This becomes possible due to perceptual groundedness of linguistic signs; meta-signs index the relationships between signs which, in their turn, index the relationships between the cognizer and those aspects of the environment which stand in reciprocal causal relation to signs of natural language [35]. Spoken utterances, by partitioning the world of which they themselves are an essential part, help construe and organize this world as a structured system of linguistically categorized experience. This system integrates all aspects of individual experience of multi-modal cognitive interactions with the world.
In writing as a system of symbols for representing the physical shape of spoken words (a symbolic artifact), understanding may be cued only with the help of symbolized linguistic items themselves, organized in such a manner as to compensate for the absent physical context by indexing points-of-reference used in simulating a second-order consensual domain. Thus, grammar becomes - not ‘the system by which the words and morphemes of a language are organized into larger units’ [42] - but a symbolized sign system for storing categorized experience wherein every grammatical category relates to some essential aspect of cognitive processing in the first-order consensual domain. Accordingly, the perceptual/cognitive aspects of interactions in the first- and second-order consensual domains and their categorization in grammar should become the focal point in instructed foreign language acquisition. Such focus marks a Cognitive Theory of Tense and Aspect developed and tested “hands-on” in the EFL classroom [43-46]. Unlike the traditional semantic analyses of grammatical categories, the CTTA takes into account a crucial factor on which understanding of meaning depends, that is, its experiential origin. Taking the experiential origin of meaning as a prerequisite assumption in the analysis of tense and aspect, the first step a grammarian should do is analyze the so-called tenses by relating them to underlying cognitive structures. In English, it is a relatively simple procedure of morphosyntactic analysis of the twelve basic forms in the active voice. But before we proceed, a few words are in place about the traditional grammatical terminology.
The standard labels for various tenses used in descriptive grammars do not form a taxonomy based on a coherent feature, or a set of features, either formal or semantic. Thus, when a certain form is referred to as a “simple tense”, the implication is that it is somehow different from a “complex tense”. Yet “complex tense” is not a term one might hope to find in the existing literature on tenses. Likewise, when in the British grammatical tradition the same form is described as an “indefinite tense”, our expectation to be shown a feature on which it is contrasted with a “definite tense” would be shamefully defeated. However, these terms are not all that arbitrary. As has been argued elsewhere [47], they intuitively reflect two possible approaches taken by linguists, the structural and the conceptual (see Table 1). The first bears on the fact that the simple tenses are, basically, inflected infinitives, and in this they are morphologically simple, as opposed to complex forms such as the progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive (we disregard the
Future Simple here as a historically later development). By the same token, a logically consistent approach to classification would require that the name “definite” be used for the “complex tenses”, but then the question arises what is actually meant by respective terms (“indefinite” vs. “definite”). They cannot refer to temporal distinctions per se, since temporal reference is made explicit through the terms Present, Past, and Future, while reference to concrete time, with different degrees of specification, is achieved by means of different lexical devices as in (13) - (14), when the so called indefinite tense is used to speak about very definite time:
(13) a. He visited St-Petersburg in his younger years.
b. He visited St-Petersburg 20 years ago.
c. He visited St-Petersburg in 1990.
d. He visited St-Petersburg in May, 1990.
e. He visited St-Petersburg during the last week of May, 1990.
(14) He arrived in St-Petersburg at exactly 11 a.m. on the 28th of May, 1990.
Table 1
Simple (Indefinite) and Complex (Definite) Tenses in the Active Voice
TENSE Simple (Indefinite) Complex (Definite)
V(suffix ) PROGRESSIVE be + Ving PERFECT have + Ven PERFECT PROGRESSIVE have been + Ving
Present I dance I am dancing I have danced I have been dancing
Past I danced I was dancing I had danced I had been dancing
Future I’ll dance I’ll be dancing I’ll have danced I’ll have been dancing
3.2. Tense
Strictly speaking, the traditional term ‘tense’ as used in regard to each of the twelve forms, is misleading, as each form is a combination of tense and aspect. Thus, all four forms in every line of Table 1 represent one tense, the present, the past, or the future. However, most grammars, both descriptive and theoretical, treat them as different tenses. Moreover, not all linguists agree on the number of tenses — for instance, Givon [32: I,148] speaks of four tenses, adding to the usual three the Habitual — “an event or state that either occurs always, or is timeless, or whose event-time is left unspecified”. Interestingly, his illustrations for the present and the habitual are as follows:
(15) a. Habitual: He (always) knows the answer
b. Present: (Right now) he knows the answer
It is obvious that the grammatical analysis here has been substituted by a functional-semantic interpretation based on the meaning of the different adverbials that may be
used with the present tense verb. Following this logic (far too common in the analyses of tenses), one would be forced to claim that, for example, the meaning of face in his now carefully bandaged face is conceptually different from the meaning offace in his always expressionless face - just because the meaning of now is different from the meaning of
always!
It is impossible to understand how grammatical tenses reflect temporal distinctions if we do not look at the origin of time as a psychological phenomenon, rooted in perceptual experience. Etymologically, the English presence descends from the Lat. prasens (pra- ‘in front of, before’, and -sens, from sensus ‘sense’); so, the meaning of prasens is ‘that which is before the senses’. The primary meaning of the term “past” is ‘beyond in position, farther than’, i.e., past literally means ‘that which is gone by, no longer current’. In other words, past refers to that domain of our experience which is not associated with current observation (is “absent”), but is retained in memory. This division of human experience of the world into two domains (“current experience” and “remembered experience”) constitutes the phenomenological foundation on which our conception of time is built [48]. Language reflects categorized reality (or, rather, construes it) in the form of a binary structure composed of two empirical domains, everything currently observed and everything that is no longer observed, because “everything said is said by an observer to another observer who can be himself or herself’ [5].
Thus, future time is the domain of predicted experience, and in this it differs essentially from the present and past time. The fact that will in the future tense forms retains its modal meaning, affects its functional properties, resulting in what is known as the Future-in-the-Past tense (note, that the term itself defies tense logic of the Reichenbachian kind based on the monolinear model of time). Yet the term is not self-contradictory as long as a different kind of logic based on cognitively categorized experience is used.
The form would (past tense of will), as in (16):
(16) Jack told me he would call her
is used to express futurity not from the speaker’s viewpoint - i. e., from the point of view of the person who actually says something like (16) - but from the point of view of the person the speaker is talking about (i. e., Jack). Accordingly, Jack would call her in the above example refers to Jack’s future, which is the past for the speaker. By the same token, if the speaker has strong reasons to believe that the promise will be kept, the other person’s future extends into the speaker’s future (shared prognosticated experience), thus making the following sentence perfectly grammatical:
(17) Jack told me he will call her.
Examples like these show that the concept of time as a knowledge structure is characterized by intrinsic perceptual groundedness; this allows to speak of the cognitive underpinning in the meaning of the grammatical category of tense, which is indication of the relationship between the described event and the observer [47]. In trivial acts of verbal communication the observer is, typically, the speaker, and this is the one and only reason why PRESENT has been traditionally defined as “the moment of speaking” [49-50], reference to which, it has been claimed, is the meaning of the word now [51-54]. But
even a cursory glance at the functional properties of now shows that this is not the case, as now can refer not only to the speaker’s present time, but to the past and the future, as in (18) - (20):
(18) She now _ found herself alone for the first time, and the feeling was weird.
(19) Now the light was lifting as the sun went down.
(20) They will be having dinner now, if I know anything about their habits.
As has been argued elsewhere [4З], the meaning of now is not ‘at the moment of speaking’, but ‘at the moment/time of observation’. Since the role of the observer may not always and exclusively be ascribed to the speaker, now can refer to different times of observation, the observers being different individuals. This is also true about such indexi-cals as today, yesterday, tomorrow, etc. Consider the title of a book by a contemporary Russian writer Boris Vassiljev:
(21) Завтра была война
‘Tomorrow was war’
The past tense of the verb places the event “war” in the past from the reader’s perspective, but the word tomorrow does not refer to the reader’s future, it refers to someone else’s future, and it is understood that this someone belongs to the reader’s past. The two indexicals used in the title orient the reader in the two different worlds - the actual world of the reader and the virtual world of the characters whose life stories are told in the book (high school graduates who leave school the day before the war starts). Such construal of virtual worlds in the cognitive domain of linguistic interactions becomes possible as a result of semiotic multiplication of the speaking observer’s phenomenological world (for details see [Зб, ch. 1]. Consequently, we can speak of a split temporal perspective in examples like (21): one is the speaker’s (reader’s), the other is someone else’s (another observer’s). Schematically, this split temporal perspective is shown in Figure 1, where “Observe^” is the speaker/reader, and “Observer2” is one of the characters in the book. Note, that by placing the indexical tomorrow at the beginning of the sentence, the author orients the reader as to whose viewpoint is given primacy in the narrative. This cognitive distinction between the speaker and the observer is reflected in the grammatical category of aspect.
PAST
PRESENT Observer 1
FUTURE
PAST
Observer 2 —0—
PRESENT
war
Tomorrow
FUTURE
Figure 1. Multiple observers and the split temporal perspective in the linguistic construal
of the world
3.3. Aspect
If we look at Figure 1 again, we will see that within each temporal domain (present, past, and future) one indefinite (simple) form is contrasted to three definite (complex) forms. This contrast parallels the contrast between the infinitive (for what are the present and past simple of regular verbs if not the inflected infinitive?) and the participle (present or past) found in the progressive and the perfect forms. This opposition is the morphological realization of the grammatical category of aspect, constituted by the opposition INDEFINITE/DEFINITE [45].
Paradoxically, the grammatical status of non-finite verbs which go under the names infinitive and participle, has not been identified in English grammar. On the one hand, if we approach these forms systematically, they constitute a classical morphological opposition in the Jakobsonian sense, since there isn’t a single verb in English, except the modals, that wouldn’t have both the forms. On the other hand, although a regular morphological opposition of two forms of a word has always been a telltale sign of a specific grammatical meaning expressed by it, and thus of a corresponding grammatical category (with an underlying cognitive structure), contemporary English studies have shunned the question, “What is the nature and meaning of the grammatical category expressed by the opposition
INFINITIVE/PARTICIPLE?”
As has been argued elsewhere [45; 55], and in keeping with the experiential origin of meaning, non-finite forms categorize the distinction between indefinite and definite sources of information about their respective referents; the infinitive refers to an event or activity without any indication that it is observed by someone, and the participle (either present or past) refers to an event or activity indicating, at the same time, that the source of information about this event may be specified as a particular observer. It is this distinction that, for example, characterizes the important cognitive difference between clausal arguments with infinitives and participles such as in (22) - (23), which descriptive grammars fail to explain:
(22) a. I saw him cross the street. b. I saw him crossing the street.
(23) a. John heard someone whistle in the dark. b. John heard someone whistling in the dark.
When grammarians focus on explaining the difference between the infinitive and participle constructions in question, the usual interpretation is as follows: the infinitive expresses the idea that the activity was witnessed by an observer/speaker from beginning to end, while the participle indicates that the observed subject was in the middle stage of the performed activity and the observer did not see it through to the end [31; 56]. So it turns out that the infinitive somehow possesses an ability to express the idea of completion of an activity, while the participle possesses an ability to express its incompletion - a preposterous assumption indeed!
Without going into much detail (for a detailed account see [55]), I make the following claim: The distinction “indefinite source of information / definite source of information” constitutes the grammatical meaning of aspect as a category expressed by the opposition infinitive/participle; this distinction underlies the systemic difference in meaning between the so-called simple tenses and the never called so ‘complex tenses’.
Within the CTTA framework, the two basic concepts of events (“observed” vs. “known”) reflect the two modes of knowledge representation, phenomenological and structural [57]. That is to say, in communication we speak either about what we see (hear, feel, etc.) or about what we just know. In the first case, the source of information about the verbal referent is definite because the observer may be identified. In the second case, no such immediate identification is possible, so the source of information about the event is indefinite (speaking of the “indefinite tense” in British terminology!). The grammatical meaning of aspect is thus defined as indication to the source of information about the event, which can be definite (based on observation), or indefinite (based on the speaker’s knowledge). So, the category of aspect falls within a wide range of linguistic means of expressing evidentiality found in different languages of the world (cf. [58]).
This set of conceptual coordinates helps simplify the process of tense-aspect acquisition by providing a common sense three-step procedure for choosing a correct form in any discourse situation (Figure 2), given that the process of instructed tense acquisition begins from the beginning, that is, from the infinitive and participle and their grammatical (categorical) meaning.
Figure 2. Decision tree for choosing a tense
4. Conclusion
The simple three-step procedure outlined above allows to considerably improve the process of instructed grammar acquisition by speakers of Russian. First, by introducing the observer as the point-of-reference in the conceptualization of a described event, it helps overcome the explanatory inadequacies of the traditional semantic approach mentioned in Section 2. Second, by grounding their linguistic behavior (the choice of a tense-aspect form) in perception and relating it either to phenomenological or structural knowledge (definite vs. indefinite source of information), Russian-speaking EFL students perform, essentially, the same cognitive operation as when they choose (even though subconsciously) aspect forms for Russian verbs (see [59]), because, as a cognitive structure, English aspect is a twin brother of Russian aspect (cf. [36, ch. 6]). Third, the use of so-called stative verbs in the progressive ceases being a mystery, and students acquire a working skill for dealing with such verbs in discourse. Thus both the students’ grammatical competence and performance are improved.
The described approach to instructed tense-aspect acquisition has been successfully used by the author and his colleagues in different educational institutions, both secondary school and college level, since the mid-1990s. Typically, it takes about six to eight weeks
for the average student to understand the workings of the entire tense-aspect system in
English — the rest is a matter of developing an automated skill in choosing an appropriate tense. This is achived with the help of a special system of exercises aimed at tuning
the student to the perceptual groundedness of tense and aspect as grammatical categories.
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