Syntax Assignment - Essay Example

This is in line with the views of Greenbaum and Quirk (1990), who insist that the words selected by a narrator are reflective of the time aspect, regardless of whether the action took place in the past, present or in the future. For example, ‘every time’ is one phrase used to show the aspect of repetitive time, relating the subjects, who are Barney and the grandmother, where emphasis is placed on the frequency of times that she tells him of the way that the ground gives way, at the edge of chalk pit.

‘Every time’ is also used to show the number of times and how often the sister would tell him about the chalk pit. For example, the text emphasizes that the sister would tell Barney the same thing, “every time she wasn’t telling him something else. ‘Today’ is used to show the present time, when Barney had nothing to do, except visit the chalk pit. ‘Once’ is used to show the aspect of the given time when the location of the chalk pit was the side of a hill. The word ‘once’ is used to show the past time (Greenbaum and Quirk, 1990). B). The author used ‘verb tense groups,’ which comprise an auxiliary verb or a verb and a principal verb tense.

The combination of the verb and the other parts of the groups are used to create the verb tense group. The need for this tense group is determined by the type of verb used. Examples from the text include ‘everybody had told him’, ‘men had come to dig away chalk and left.’ ‘His sister, every time she wasn’t telling him something else’, he thought of all the sticks of chalk’, and ‘the sticks of chalk they must have made.’ C). The tenses used within the verb tense groups used throughout the text fall under the three main classifications: past, present and future tense.

These tenses are used to show the time of a verb’s being or action (Matthews, 2003). In doing this, the ending of the verb is conjugated to show the time of reference. For