Try : The British National Corpus (BNC) with a 100 million word collection of
samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to
represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written
e.g.
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=in+the+past+century
Or
http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/index.html
Patsi
shun Tang wrote:
> Larry,
>
> Unfortunately enough, you cannot provided an example. I admit examples for
> English is extremely difficult. Common examples are very rare. Grammarians
> searching for thousands of books without noticing examples for 'in the
> past'. Teachers have trouble to find English examples, even spending half a
> day in newspaper. But this is the usual way we find the 'common examples' to
> convince pupils.
>
> Shun
> englishtense.com
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Larry Beason" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 4:03 AM
> Subject: Re: The main use of a tense
>
> Shun,
> Sadly enough, I've seen too many English teachers (K-college) who, in my
> opinion, needlessly mark "tense shift" or some such comment when students
> shift tenses within a paragraph--and shift for good reason, such as those
> instance you & others mention.
>
> I think part of the reason teachers mark such 'errors' is that they really
> do not understand what present tense in English (much less perfect tense) is
> all about.
>
> I wish I had an example. I used to keep a couple around when teaching
> English-education or grammar courses.
>
> larry
>
> <<< shun Tang <[log in to unmask]> 5/20 3:30a >>>
> Dear Rosanne,
>
> You wrote:
> > Actually, more than one tense can be used in a paragraph, even in
> > adjacent sentences,
> >
> My reply: No one will be so naive as to conclude that there can be only one
> kind of tense in a paragraph. Or else, we will fall into again the
> difficulty between Simple Past paragraph and Present Prefect paragraph.
>
> I just explained that in the following situation:
> Ex: Yesterday I saw a new department store open around my home. I bought
> many things from it.
> == We may not have a hectic argument on using Simple Past or Present
> Perfect. In my website I call this combination as {Past Past}.
>
> Or will you explain, in this above example, why you can use Present Perfect
> (for the second sentence)? Because of Perfective aspect? Current relevance?
> Resultative Perfect? Or a period up to the present? (Present Perfect relates
> to more jargons than you can collect.)
>
> On the other hand, in some situations, we can only use {Past Perfect}.
> That is, the timeline of the situations demands the use of Present Perfect.
> This has been explained in my humble website.
>
> Thank you for your attention.
>
> Shun
> englishtense.com
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rosanne Gangi-Gaertner" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2001 8:24 PM
> Subject: Re: The main use of a tense
>
> > Dear Shun:
> >
> > Actually, more than one tense can be used in a paragraph, even in adjacent
> > sentences, e.g.,
> >
> > "Yesterday, I saw a new department store open near my home. I'm going to
> > visit it tomorow."
> >
> > Tense is a sentence-level phenomenon; however, I do agree with you that
> > many grammar texts use too many sentences out of context and should
> present
> > more contextualized material.
> >
> > Rosanne Gangi-Gaertner
> >
> >
> > >Ex: Yesterday I saw a new department store open around my home. I bought
> > >many things from it.
> > >== Simple Past is compulsory, used to connect to the time of the former
> > >sentence. It is the true use of a tense. Likewise, the true use of a
> brick
> > >is seen in the companionship of other bricks. We may argue that a brick
> can
> > >be sometimes used as a hammer, or sending messages through windows or
> > >holding down tarps, but at least we have to state its main use first as
> you
> > >do.
> > >
> > >Nevertheless, since using many sentences to explain a tense seems
> > >troublesome, present-day grammars prefer to keep on one-sentence basis.
> This
> > >is convenient, but results in more troublesome than they can imagine.
> They
> > >obviously miss the true use of tense.
> > >
> > >Shun
> > >englishtense.com
> >
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> >
> >
>
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