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Makale Özeti:
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Native speakers of Croatian often have problems
with appropriate usage of English tenses that do not exist in
Croatian, frequently associating past forms in English with
perfective meanings in Croatian and non-past forms with
imperfective meanings (because Croatian has verb aspect).
They also encounter difficulties with non-temporal uses of
English tenses.
Apart from the central meaning of tense as temporal
reference, there are four non-temporal meanings of English
tenses (Tyler, 2000): (1) emotional distance or intimacy; (2)
the relative salience or status of the information being
conveyed; (3) negative epistemic stance towards a particular
scenario; (4) to express requests, commands and invitations.
Although some non-temporal meanings are very similar to
those in English, there are also significant differences that
cause difficulties to native speakers of Croatian in learning
English as L2. Some of the differences are caused by
metaphorical and metonymical shifts in meaning between the
source domain (time distance) and the target domain
(distance between wish and reality, simulating of distance in
order to avoid direct appeal, distance of the deictic centre,
counterfactual possible situation, etc.). In order to examine
those assumptions, 102 students – English learners – were
tested. Differences mainly occurred in cases when the past
tense is used in English to signal (1) a negative epistemic
stance towards a particular scenario and (2) tense as an
expression of attenuation: invitations, requests and
suggestions, because Croatian speakers tended to use the
present tense in some cases.
We argue that a consistent description of non-temporal uses
of tenses in Croatian and English, with analysis of
differences, can facilitate the learning of these frequently
occurring non-temporal uses of English tenses.
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