A Corpus Analysis of Temporal Adverbs and Verb Tenses Cooccurrence in Spanish, English, and Chinese

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 aun '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.