PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 6 page

OF THE TENSES

The relative frequency of tenses depends on the kind of literature chosen for statistic counts. The three tables below will illustrate this.

Table II

THE USE OF TENSES IN FICTION[45]

Below the data of the table are listed in accordance with the de­creasing frequency of the tenses:

Past Static 57.7%

Present Static 25.5%

Beforepast Static 5.2%

Beforepresent Static 3.8%

Future Static 3.0%

Past Dynamic 2.4%

Present Dynamic 1.900%

Beforepresent Dynamic 0.200%

Beforepast Dynamic 0.170%

Future Dynamic 0.060%

Beforefuture Static 0.002%

Beforefuture Dynamic —

The above data show that in fiction by far the most frequently used tense is the Past Static, the rest of the tenses being from approximately 2 (the Present Static) to 23,000 (the Beforefuture Static) times less frequent.

The data also show that the frequency figures below 1% illustrate the use of the respective tenses extremely vaguely. These tenses, there­fore, have been counted in the text (fiction) amounting to about 50,000 pages. The results of the count are arranged in Table III, the figures in the third and fourth columns indicating the number of pages per tense (pp/tense) and the frequency ratio of each tense relative to the Beforepresent Dynamic (times less than the Beforepresent Dynamic). For comparison, the pp/tense for the Past Static is also given in the table.

Table III

FREQUENCY OF USE OF ANTERIOR DYNAMIC, BEFOREFUTURE STATIC, AND FUTURE DYNAMIC TENSES

The data of the table listed in accordance with their decreasing
frequency:

Present Static 90.0%

Future Static 5.3%

Past Static 2.0%

Beforepresent Static 1.2%

Present Dynamic 1.0%

Future Dynamic, Beforefuture Static 0.07%

Beforepast Static 0.05%

Past Dynamic, Relative Dynamic —

The data show that in technical literature the Present Static is by far the most frequently used tense (90%), the Future Static being about 17 and the Beforepast Static 1,760 times less frequent.

Table IV

THE USE OF TENSES IN TECHNICAL LITERATURE[46]

The relative frequency list of the use of tenses in stage direction (see table V):

Present Static 93.22%

Beforepresent Static 2.67%

Present Dynamic 2.57%

Past Static .84%

Beforepresent Dynamic .31%

Future Static .25%

Beforepast Static .14%.

Table V

THE USE OF TENSES IN STAGE DIRECTIONS[47]

Table VI

RELATIVE FREQUENCY OF TENSES (%)

IN DIFFERENT KINDS OF TEXT

Finally, in TableVI comparison is made of relative frequencies (%) of present and beforepresent tenses used in fiction, technical literature, and stage directions.

The data of the table show that the Present Dynamic and the Be­forepresent Dynamic in stage directions are used about 1.5 times more frequently and the Beforepresent Static about 1.5 times less frequently than in fiction.

RELATIVE FREQUENCY OF TENSES

IN THE PASSIVE VOICE

Relative frequencies of different tense-aspect forms (the data are based on successive selection from 1,000 pages of fiction text and 500 pages of text for each of the other functional styles) are given in Table VI I.

Table VII

Only ten tense-aspect forms out of the theoretically possible sixteen (See p. 50) are used in the Passive Voice against fourteen in the Active. Practically not used are the Dynamic Anterior (the Beforepresent Dynamic, Beforefuture Dynamic, Beforepast Dynamic, and the Before-future Dynamic-in-the-Past), the Future Dynamic as well as the Future Dynamic-in-the-Past, that is the tenses that would contain be + being in their structures (the thumb rule: practically no be — be tenses in English), for example:

*He will have been being asked.

This rule, however, is not absolutely airtight, as is witnessed by such extremely rare (three instances, including two infinitives, .per 150,000 pages of text) examples as:

"I shall always be being pushed away from him by her (J. Galsworthy); At the same moment an elephant calf may be being born a mile or two away in the Jungle (J. Williams); "She may have been being blackmailed by someone" (A. Christie).

The relative frequencies of different tense-aspect verb forms are comparable with those of the Active Voice (See Tables II and IV on pp. 51 and 53).

In accordance with the statistic counts (1000 pages of consecutive selection) the Active Voice in fiction is about 9 times more frequent than the Passive. In linguistic text the relation of Active to Passive is about 1.4 to 1.

FACTORS INFLUENCING THE CHOICE

OF THE TENSES IN SPEECH

A careful study of the use of tenses reveals the fact that their choice in speech depends not only on the content of the information conveyed and the meaning of tenses but also on a number of other factors.

These factors are of two kinds: those conditioned mainly by the peculiarities of the English verb system, the speaker's possibility to choose being secondary in importance, and those permitting the speaker to choose, in a given speech situation, from two or more tenses comply­ing with the peculiarities of the system.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 498