| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 1-16 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 December 2022 |
| Received: 8 October 2022 / Received in Revised Form: 30 November 2022 / Accepted: 13 December 2022 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2022.3.2.1
|
A corpus analysis of temporal adverbs and verb tenses cooccurrence in Spanish, English, and Chinese |
| An Chung Cheng (University of Toledo) USA; Hui-Chuan Lu (National Cheng Kung University), TAIWAN |
| Copyright 2022 APJCR
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| This study investigates the cooccurrence between temporal adverbs and grammatical tenses in Spanish and contrasts temporal specifications across Spanish, English, and Chinese. Based on a monolingual Spanish corpus and a trilingual parallel corpus, the study identified the top ten frequent single-word temporal adverbs collocating with grammatical tenses in Spanish. It also contrasted the cooccurrence of temporal adverbs and verb tenses in three languages. The results show that aún ‘still’, hoy ‘today’, and ahora ‘now’ collocate with the present tense at more than 80%. Ayer ‘yesterday’ and finalmente ‘finally’ cooccurring with the simple past tense are at 84% and 69%, respectively. Then, mientras ‘meanwhile’ collocates with the past imperfect at 55%, the highest of all. Mañana ‘tomorrow’ cooccurs with the future and present tenses at 34%. Other adverbs, ya ‘already’, siempre ‘always’, and nuevamete ‘again’, do not present a strong cooccurrence tendency with a tense overall. The contrastive analysis of the trilingual parallel corpus shows a comprehensive view of temporal specifications in the three languages. However, no clear one-to-one mapping pattern of the cooccurrence across the three languages can be concluded, which provides helpful insights for second language instruction with natural language data rather than intuition. Future research with larger corpora is needed. |
Keywords |
| Corpus-based Analysis, Grammatical Tenses, Temporal Adverbs, Cross-language Comparison, Contrastive Analysis |
References |
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The Authors |
| An Chung Cheng is a Professor of Spanish at the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the director of the Asian Studies Institute at the University of Toledo, USA. Her research interests include second language acquisition, input processing, corpus linguistics, and teacher education.
Hui-Chuan Lu is a Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Spanish linguistics, corpus linguistics, and syntax studies. |
The Authors’ Addresses |
| First and Corresponding Author An Chung Cheng Professor Department of World Languages and Cultures The University of Toledo 2801 W. Bancroft St, Toledo, OH 43606, United States E-mail: Anchung.Cheng@utoledo.edu Seri Kembangan, Selangor, MALAYSIA E-mail: gs56165@student.upm.edu.myCo-author Hui-Chuan Lu Professor Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University 1 University Rd, East District, Tainan City 70101, TAIWAN E-mail: huichuanlu1@gmail.com  DOI QR Code |
