Synthetic and Analytic Present and Past Verb Forms in English , German and Czech

The paper compares three languages – English, German, and Czech in terms of the verbal subcategories that denote present and past states and actions. It shows that all three languages use precisely two tenses – present and preterite, and they can be expressed either synthetically (English, German) or analytically (Czech). Furthermore, the paper studies the issue of grammatical aspect, comparing English, which has perfect and progressive aspect, with German, which has perfect aspect, and Czech, which also expresses perfect aspect grammatically – this is frequently labelled as Slavic perfect. This structure in Czech is, however, not regarded as a purely grammaticalized category of aspect by many scholars, such as Karlík and Migdalski (2017).


Morphological Typology of the Languages in Question¹
In terms of the number of morphemes per word, Comrie (1989) recognizes isolating/analytic and (poly)synthetic languages.Analytic languages (such as Vietnamese or Chinese) do not have bound morphology, i.e. one word corresponds to one morpheme -see example (1).On the other hand, synthetic languages combine a number of morphemes into a single word, as in Czech -example (2).
(1) Wo zhu zai Bulage.Chinese I live in Prague "I live in Prague." (2) Žij-u v Praz-e.Czech live-1.SG2 in Prague.LOC.SG "I live in Prague." Whereas in (1), one word contains exactly one morpheme, the Czech example (2) demonstrates that a single word, typically a noun, adjective, or verb consists of more than one morpheme.
Another perspective of classification refers to the degree of fusion.In agglutinative languages (such as Turkish, for example), one morpheme strictly corresponds to one subcategory.This means that the boundaries between the morphemes are clear-cutsee (3).On the other hand, fusional languages (for example Russian, Czech) have mor-D.Masár Machová, P. Charvátová & P. Bačuvčíková phemes that "fuse" several morpholosyntactic features, i.e. there is a correpondence of one morpheme to several features correspondence -see (4).
(3) adam-larin Turkish man PL GEN "man's" (4) stol-ů Czech table GEN.PL "of tables" In example (3), each hyphenated morpheme carries one grammatical feature (namely number and case).On the other hand, the example from Czech (4) demonstrates that a single morpheme carries both number and case features.
Natural languages are not perfect representatives of the morphological typologies, i.e. no language is completely isolating or agglutinative (see for instance Sapir (1921) or Skalička (1966)).Therefore, the typology is traditionally represented by two scales indicating the degree of synthesis and fusion in a language (Sapir 1921), as presented in The two indexes represent relative scales, not absolute ones, and they work well for a comparison of languages.More interestingly, a single language can realize different grammatical phenomena variably with respect to the morphological typology.That is, in English the subcategory of number is productively expressed using a bound morpheme -s, but determination is expressed analytically, i.e. by a free morpheme the or a.The following section attempts to state the morphological tendencies observed in the three languages, especially from the perspective of the index of synthesis -more precisely, it poses the question whether the languages are more analytic or synthetic.

English
Referring to the typology presented above, English is frequently described as an analytic, rather than synthetic language, with respect to the degree of synthesis.This can be illustrated by modality or aspect features, see (5).The modal and aspect are realized by free morphemes, not by bound morphology on the lexical verb.
(5) He must have been examined.On the other hand, certain morphemes are of a fusional character -see ( 7).

German
On the other hand, German, as another representative of Germanic languages, is an inflectional language.In terms of the index of synthesis, it can be positioned between English and Czech.As Finck (2010) or Roelcke (1997)
Features such as case and number with nouns, or grading with adjectives are expressed by bound morphemes ( 11).
(11) mlad-ší muž young COMP.NOM.M man.SG.NOM "younger man" Analytic characteristics can be observed with prepositions ( 12), which are expressed as free morphemes, unlike in many other synthetic languages.
(12) ve vod-ě in water LOC.SG "in the water" With respect to the index of fusion, Czech is a rather fusional language.One morpheme can realize several features, such as number and case, and these cannot be separated -see ( 13).
(13) kočk-ám cat DAT.PL "(to/for) cats" Agglutination can be found in the word formation process (14a-c).In many cases, agglutination and inflection are combined.Referring to Figure 1, the three languages can be classified as follows, Figure 2.However, as mentioned above, such a comparison is rather approximate, since one language can combine all tendencies, i.e. in English, grading of adjectives can be analytic or synthetic, verbal morphology tends to be fusional, but derivation is often realized in an agglutinative manner.

Tense and Aspect
The terms tense and aspect are far from being trivial ones, and linguistic literature abounds in sources addressing these concepts from various perspectives.This paper will use Comrie's definition (1985, 9) that views tense as a grammaticalized expression of location in time.More precisely, a different set of morphological forms related to the same verb refers to present time (15a) or past time (15b) events.
(15) a.He works in Prague.
b.He worked in Prague.
Another verbal subcategory in question is aspect.Unlike tense, aspect denotes how the action is viewed, rather than when.Hewson and Bubenik (1997, 12), quoting Comrie (1976, 5) define aspect as "internal temporal constituency of the one situation".
b.She was planting flowers yesterday.
While both refer to past time, and are morphologically past tenses, (16a) refers to a completed event, whereas (16b) denotes the same process as ongoing.There are several linguistic means that can contribute to the aspectual meaning of a verb phrase in each language.One of them, Aktionsart, can can be encoded in a verb lexically: to study vs. to pass the test, by a prefix or sufix in Slavic languages, such as in psát (imp.)-napsat (perf.), as discussed in detail in Nübler (2017).This paper will, however, deal with grammatical aspect only, as illustrated in (16b) above.

Formal vs. Functional Analysis of Verb forms
Due to different grammatical traditions in the studies of English, German, and Czech languages, a crosslinguistic analysis of verbal forms used in the referred languages may not be straightforward.More precisely, various traditions may use divergent terminology for the same concepts, and such differences may render the analyses mutually incomparable.Generally, the verb forms can be either based on their formal structure, i.e. morphemes that they demonstrate, or functionally, referring to the time they denote.In most cases, the two approaches will lead to the same conclusions, but there are many cases, where applying formal or functional criteria lead to different results, as in ( 17).
b.She ha-s read the book.
From the functional perspective, (17a) refers to the future time, whereas (17b) refers to the past time.Formally, however, (17a) is a present tense, demonstrating -s inflectional morpheme.Similarly (17b) is analysed as a present tense (in combination with a perfect aspect), again demonstrating the -s morpheme.This paper will analyze the tenses and aspects used in the three langauges solely from the formal perspective.In other words, we will analyze the inventory of morphemes available in English, German, and Czech, categorize them in terms of tense/aspect categories and compare them in the three languages.The paper will focus on verb forms referring to the present and the past, i.e.
forms expressing future will not be discussed in detail.

English Tense and Aspect Inventory
The English language uses the combination of two grammatical tenses and two aspects.
Tenses are expressed synthetically by -s and -ed morphemes for the present and past tense, respectively. 3The two tenses can be modified for analytic aspects -namely perfect and progressive.Perfect morphology includes have and -en morphology (past participle verb form).The progressive aspect is formed by the auxiliary be and -ing morpheme (present participle verb form), as shown in form can be decomposed into a verbal root and respective tense/aspect morphology.
3 Although many grammar manuals regard future as another tense, this paper will not consider English will to be a tense.The authors regard will as a modal, as argued, for example, in Machová (2015, 50), which inherently refers to the future as any other modal, and thus is replaceable by any member from the category -see (i).
(i) The project will/must have been finished by Monday.
Colloquium: New Philologies • Vol 2, No 2 (2017) D. Masár Machová, P. Charvátová & P. Bačuvčíková In terms of semantics of the verb forms, their temporal (present, past) and aspectual meaning (perfect, progressive) is based on their tense and aspect elements.As a result, the present perfect denotes states and actions that are completed (aspect) with respect to the present time (tense), and the past perfect denotes actions that are completed (aspect) with respect to the past time (tense).Thus, the use of the present perfect for finished past events yields ungrammatical sentences -see ( 18).
As has been illustrated, English uses two tenses, which are synthetic, and two aspects, which are analytic.Their combinations form eight verb forms in total that can be used for expressing present and past states and events.
Due to their time references, there is a tendency to group them as follows: -present -Präsens -past -Perfekt, Präteritum, Plusquamperfekt -future -Futur I, Futur II4 Such analysis is based on a functional approach.This paper, however, focuses on a formal analysis of the verb forms and, therefore, we will analyse them based on their subcategories -tense and aspect.Under this approach, German has two tenses, namely Präsens/present and Präteritum/preterite.When such a viewpoint is adopted, the German temporal system demonstrates a wellstructured layout, not very different from the English one, as shown in Table 2.

Ø aspect perfect aspect
Präsens/present tense mach-e ha-t ge-mach-t Präteritum/past tense mach-t-e hat-t-e ge-mach-t Table 2: German tense and aspect inventory Despite the fact that the German system overlaps with the English one to a great extent, the verbal complexes do not have identical semantics, and they are not used in exactly the same contexts.To mention one example, German Perfekt is used in a different way than English present perfect.In particular, German Perfekt can be interchanged with simple Präteritum in situations when the aspect of anteriority is not stressed -compare (21a) for German and (21b) for English.
b.We stayed here last summer.= *We have stayed here last summer.
Whereas in English, the difference between past and present perfect is grammatical, the difference in German is rather a stylistic or regional one.

Czech Tense and Aspect Inventory
Traditionally, Czech is claimed to have three tenses, namely synthetic present (22a), analytic preterite (22b), and analytic future (22c)6 , as for example in Komárek and Kořenský (1986, 163ff.)Despite the fact that Czech is a synthetic language, preterite is expressed analyticallymore precisely by auxiliary být "to be " + -l participle, as shown in (22b).8However, 3 rd person singular and plural are synthetic, i.e. the auxiliary být "to be " is ungrammatical in this case -see the singular paradigm for the verb "cook " in ( 23).
( "When I came, Peter had cooked lunch." Despite the fact that the Czech perfect seems to be a counterpart of the English perfect aspect, it is generally not listed as a grammatical category.Karlík and Migdalski (2017) point out that Slavic perfect makes the verb action become static, and therefore, they find it problematic to categorize it as a true perfect.Slavic perfect is also incompati- The following table summarizes the verbal forms of Czech.
Ø aspect ?perfect aspect present tense vař-ím m-ám u-vař-eno preterite/past tense vař-il js-em m-ěl js-em u-vař-eno Table 3: Czech tense and aspect inventory Slavic perfect is marked with a question mark.Taking this into consideration, the Czech language possesses the poorest tense and (grammatical) aspect inventory of the three languages.

Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to investigate verbal forms used for denoting present and past states and actions in English, German, and Czech.In this regard, all languages have the same inventory of tenses -namely present and preterite.In English and German, these are expressed synthetically, whereas in Czech, which is regarded the most synthetic of all three, preterite is expressed analytically.As for the aspect, all three languages demonstrate the morphology of a perfect aspect.As concerns the progressive aspect, English is the only language, in which the progressive aspect is a part of the verbal category, i.e. is fully grammaticalized -see the following table .

Figure
Figure 1 below.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Typology of English, German and Czech Colloquium: New Philologies • Vol 2, No 2 (2017) D. Masár Machová, P. Charvátová & P. Bačuvčíková ble with imperfective verbs due to semantic reasons (this is similar to future).Clancy   (2010, 185ff.),despite labelling this construction as a new perfect, states that the verbal complex stands in between a true perfect and a resultative construction (28a-b), and as a grammatical construction, it is still subject to grammaticalization.(28) a.I have done my homework.perfect aspect b.I have my homework done.resultative construction

Table 1 :
English tense and aspect inventoryNotice that all verb forms in Table1are fully constitutional.In other words, each verb Similarly to English, these two tenses can be modified by a perfect aspect, consisting of auxiliary haben "have " or sein "be" in combination with past participle, thus verb +