The analysis of Past tense expression in the texts of different functional styles

The two journalists, who worked for Polish state television, were killed after a car they were driving in ran over a mine and was fired upon by unidentified gunmen, according to Lt Col Robert Strzelecki, a spokesman for Polish forces in Iraq.

The third journalist, cameraman Jerzy Ernst, was wounded in the arm and airlifted to an American hospital

The two men were killed near the town of Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, local police said.

Two CNN journalists were killed in the area in January.

The PR exercise was widely scorned across the region after Mr. Bush stopped short of making a public apology.

They believe that the bomb may have been assembled in this state park.

The latest killings come just hours after US president George Bush appeared on Iraqi TV in a damage limitation exercise, after pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners were broadcast around the Arab world.

       So, we have examined two texts in order to analyse how the past tenses are used in the newspaper style and found out that, whereas the immediate news reports used the present perfect, the delayed report from Newsweek used only simple past.

     We draw the conclusion that the past tense takes very important part in newspapers and written publications.

      There is one more style of language within the field of standard literary English which has become singled out, and that is the style of official documents, or “officialese”, as it is sometimes called.

    Official documents are written in a formal, “cold” or matter-of-fact style of speech. The aim of communication in this style of language is to reach agreement between two contracting parties.

     The style of official documents possesses its own features which are reflected in standardized forms of different documents. They are peculiarities of the vocabulary, grammar and syntactic constructions, which are the subject of consideration in the practical part of this paper.

        The correctness of the documents is also significant. Correctness involves proper grammar use (tense-aspect forms of the verb, verbals, articles, etc.), vocabulary use, punctuation and formal style. Grammar should be checked with a special care; otherwise it may produce a poor impression of the document and non-seriousness of your interests.

       Grammar of any document may be characterized as rather simple and formal. Simple here means lack of diversity of variants which occurs in every document which is not legal. As for the grammar tenses which are used in agreements, the most widespread are the Indefinite and the Perfect tenses. In many points their usage is already part and parcel. For example, in the part of “the charter of the United Nations”⁴⁰, we have found such frequent use of the present perfect tense as:

“We, the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”.

“To employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts”

“Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the City of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations”. (Present Perfect)

Although the specific character of any document provides rare usage of the past tenses, we have found one document, which is written in the past tense.

         From the analysis of the document of the “Norilsk Nickel company”, we have seen the frequent use of the past simple tense, as in the examples:

           Russian wholesale power generating company OGK-3 reported a RUR 341 million (approx. $13.1m) net loss for the first three quarters of last year. This is half of last year’s loss but still the result disappointed analysts. But they think the poor financial performance was no surprise for Norilsk Nickel, which purchased OGK-3’s new share issue late last month. OGK-3 has published its interim combined and consolidated financial report for January-September 2006. Revenue is reported at RUR 14.86 billion (approx. $571.5m), core profit stands at RUR 274 million (approx. $10.5m), and net loss is RUR 341 million (approx. $13.1m), under the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The company blamed the poor performance on the fact that its profit and loss report did not show a tariff imbalance of RUR 868.86 million (approx. $26.4m) for 2005 and RUR 404.36 million (approx. $15.55m) for the nine months of 2006, as well as on early payment of tax debt. The results disappointed analysts. “They are somewhat worse than we expected,” Semen Birg, at FINAM investment consultants, told RBC Daily. “It is not incidental that they were published after the company’s new share issue. They could have frightened off some of the potential investors,” he stressed. Birg said the revenue was lower than expected. “Earlier we projected OGK-3’s revenue for 2006 at $865 million. Now we have to revise our estimates,” he said.  Irina Filatova, at BrokerCreditService, said the financial reports of generating companies in accordance with IFRS reflected their activities not quite correctly. “This is due to their young age,” she said, noting that the market was looking at the cost per 1 KW of installed capacity, due to positive expectations connected with the liberalization of the gas and electricity markets. “As an example take OGK-5, which published not very strong reports preparing for an IPO,” he said.  “I don’t think Norilsk Nickel made a mistake. The company issued new shares (18 billion shares, 61 percent of the current and 37.9 percent of the increased authorized capital) on 13 March 2007. Norilsk Nickel, which offered RUR 4.54 (approx. $0.17) per share, won the auction. The whole issue was valued at RUR 81.7 billion ($3.1 billion).

(Past Indefinite Active / Passive)

        Complex analytical forms of the verb, such as the Continuous and Perfect Continuous Tenses, are absolutely not used in any way. One of the specific features of contract is the usage of the verb shall. Though it is not used in Modern English, in business correspondence and documents it keeps being used. For example,” The result shall be considered. = The result is to be considered / will be considered”.

      In the style of official documents, however, passive voice is more readily accepted since using it allows one to write without using personal pronouns or the names of particular persons as the subjects of sentences. This practice helps to create the appearance of an objective, fact-based discourse because contracting parties can present agreements and conclusions without attributing them to particular agents. Instead, the writing appears to convey information that is not limited or biased by individual perspectives or personal interests. See the examples:

Revenue is reported at RUR 14.86 billion (approx. $571.5m), core profit stands at RUR 274 million (approx. $10.5m), and net loss is RUR 341 million (approx. $13.1m), under the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The whole issue was valued at RUR 81.7 billion ($3.1 billion). RAO UES’s stake in OGK-3 has reduced from 59.7 to 37.08 percent.

Russia's worst-ever coalmine disaster this week, in which at least 106 have been killed, casts doubt on claims by Evraz, the Russian steelmaker seeking to acquire Highveld Steel & Vanadium in South Africa, that its industrial practices, work safety record, and environmental compliance meet the required standards.

In its IPO prospectus, issued when Evraz shares were sold on the London Stock Exchange for the first time in July 2005, Evraz reported that Yuzhkuzbassugol was "under common control with Evraz".

Evraz's compliance record in Novokuznetsk city, where the mine company is based, was hit last year with the largest financial penalties ever imposed by the Russian government on a Rusdsian company. Evraz was penalized for water pollution from two of Evraz's steelmills, located in the area.

The Kemerovo regional government, long headed by Governor Aman Tuleyev, has been accused of corruption and bribe-taking in US court cases involving contested ownership of a regional aluminium smelter. Tuleyev was also involved last year in allowing another Russian steelmaker, Vladimir Lisin, owner of Novolipetsk Steel, to bail out of the Prokopievskugol mine in Kemerovo by selling it to the local government for one rouble.

Last month, the European Commission ruled that Evraz's attempt to buy Highveld's vanadium assets threatens monopoly control of the steel alloy worldwide, and ordered the Russians to divest most of them, if the takeover is to proceed.

        We draw the conclusion that, among grammar tenses which are used in the style of official documents, the most widespread are the Indefinite and the Perfect tenses, both in the present and the past time.

      The style of scientific prose is mainly characterized by an arrangement of language means which will bring proofs to clinch a theory. The main function of scientific prose is proof.

       Science reports are written to communicate research in an effective and scientific manner. Experiments in biology, chemistry, or any other discipline, cannot increase the sum of knowledge unless they are shared and understood by others. Scientists report the results of their research activities in scientific journals using two major types of papers: the review paper and the research paper.

       The review paper provides a summary and interpretation of all of the research on a specific topic

       The research paper presents the results of an original experiment. It is an argument founded on supporting evidence from the data obtained in the laboratory work and includes six sections: Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and Literature Cited.

       Scientific writing often uses a style different from other types of writing. As you read scientific texts pay careful attention to the style used by the author. In the scientific style are always used the passive voice, which stresses the subject being observed or tested, rather than the active voice, which stresses the researcher. In this voice, the sentence wants to emphasize the action and not who is doing the action.   

For example,

Active: “I recorded the temperature of the solution and then added 3ml of HCl”.

Passive:  “After the temperature of the solution was recorded, 3ml of HCl were added”.

But some scientific journals require the use of the active voice to save space, since sentences in the active voice tend to be shorter. But let’s return to the question of the tense.

        Indiscriminate changes in tense are confusing and can give meaning to a statement which does not accord with the facts. However it can be acceptable to write in more than one tense in the literature review, for example,

"Brown (1995) showed that the brain is more fully developed at birth than other organs".

In this case the present tense can be used for the second half of the sentence because it gives knowledge that is universally accepted. The articles in the scientific style are written in past tense unless it is describing present or future situations. The first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence, that’s why in scientific prose style we can observe the frequent use of the simple past tense.

       To prove it, we have chosen the part of the article, under the title “The history of DNA research, which was taken from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia⁴¹.

   DNA was first isolated by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher who, in 1869, discovered a microscopic substance in the pus of discarded surgical bandages. As it resided in the nuclei of cells, he called it "nuclein". In 1919, Phoebus Levene identified the base, sugar and phosphate nucleotide unit. Levene suggested that DNA consisted of a string of nucleotide units linked together through the phosphate groups. However, Levene thought the chain was short and the bases repeated in a fixed order. In 1937 William Astbury produced the first X-ray diffraction patterns that showed that DNA had a regular structure.

   In 1928, Frederick Griffith discovered that traits of the "smooth" form of the Pneumococcus could be transferred to the "rough" form of the same bacteria by mixing killed "smooth" bacteria with the live "rough" form. This system provided the first clear suggestion that DNA carried genetic information, when Oswald Avery, along with coworkers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty, identified DNA as the transforming principle in 1943. DNA's role in heredity was confirmed in 1952, when Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase in the Hershey-Chase experiment showed that DNA is the genetic material of the T2 phage.

   In 1953, based on X-ray diffraction images taken by Rosalind Franklin and the information that the bases were paired, James D. Watson and Francis Crick suggested what is now accepted as the first accurate model of DNA structure in the journal Nature Experimental evidence for Watson and Crick's model were published in a series of five articles in the same issue of Nature. Of these, Franklin and Raymond Gosling's paper was the first publication of X-ray diffraction data that supported the Watson and Crick model, this issue also contained an article on DNA structure by Maurice Wilkins and his colleagues. In 1962, after Franklin's death, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

   In an influential presentation in 1957, Crick laid out the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology, which foretold the relationship between DNA, RNA, and proteins, and articulated the "adaptor hypothesis". Final confirmation of the replication mechanism that was implied by the double-helical structure followed in 1958 through the Meselson-Stahl experiment. Further work by Crick and coworkers showed that the genetic code was based on non-overlapping triplets of bases, called codons, allowing Har Gobin Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg to decipher the genetic code. These findings represented the birth of molecular biology.

        Scientific material seems easy to read due to its grammatical structure. The use of the past simple tense is the feature of textual structure to present arguments transparently and coherently, distributing its information content in ways which make it seem accessible and digestible.

   Established knowledge (statements of fact, natural laws, universal (established) truths, or a widely held tenet of science) is given in the simple present tense, for example,

  “The atom of any elementary substance consists of a positively-charged nucleus and electrons, negatively-charged particles surrounding the nucleus” and the new results and findings of an author's own research are given in the simple past tense, for example,

    “Bednarik (1959) found that this Drepanidae was extremely sensitive to light”.

Materials and methods should be written in the past simple tense.

    "The experiment was designed in the form of a 6 x 6 Latin square."

Remarks about Results should mainly be in the simple past tense.

   "When a high protein diet was fed to rabbits they grew rapidly."

   Any conclusions drawn should be also in the simple past tense, for example,

   “Pigs in this experiment grew most rapidly when fish meal was added to their diets”.

When referring to the conclusions of a particular experiment, it is incorrect to state pigs grow most rapidly when fish meal is added to the diet.

    So, scientists tend to use the passive voice and the simple past tense when describing their investigations, and the simple present tense for the established knowledge.

         With respect to the functional styles, vocabulary can be subdivided into bookish (literary), which is typical of formal styles, and colloquial vocabulary which is typical of the lower style in oral communication; besides there is always present in the language a stylistically neutral vocabulary which can be used in different kinds of style.

        The style of informal, friendly oral communication is called colloquial. The vocabulary of colloquial style is usually lower than that of the formal or neutral styles, it is often emotionally coloured and characterised by connotations (consider the endearing connotations in the words daddy, kid or the evaluating components in trash).

       Colloquial speech is characterised by the frequent use of words with a broad meaning (something close to polysemy): speakers tend to use a small group of words in quite different meanings, whereas in a formal style (official, business, scientific) every word is to be used in a specific and clear meaning.

There are phrases and constructions typical of colloquial style: What’s up? (= What has happened?); so-so (= not especially good); Sorry? Pardon? (= Please, repeat it, I didn’t hear you); See you (= Good-bye); Me too / neither (= So / neither do I), etc.

In grammar there may be: (a) the use of shortened variants of word-forms, e.g. isn’t; can’t; I’d say, he’d’ve done (= would have done); Yaa (= Yes); (b) the use of elliptical (incomplete) sentences; (Where’s he?) – At home; Like it? (= Do you / Did you like it?) – Not too much (= I don’t like it too much); (Shall I open it?) – Don’t!; May I? (= May I do this?)

       In order to analyse the past time in colloquial style, we chose the part of the interview, which is given by US President Barack Obama about his first date⁴².

       Barack Obama talks about a milestone moment in his life — his first date with his wife, Michelle.

     I met Michelle in 1988, after my first year of law school, when I took a summer job at Sidley & Austin, a law firm in Chicago. A year earlier I had been working as a community organizer in some of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods, and I struggled with the decision to go to a large firm. But with student loans mounting, the three months of salary they offered wasn't something I could pass up.

     Michelle worked at Sidley, too, and, in the luckiest break of my life, was assigned to be my adviser, charged with helping me learn the ropes. I remember being struck by how tall and beautiful she was. She, I`ve since learned, was pleasantly surprised to see that my nose and ears weren't quite as enormous as they looked in the photo I'd submitted for the firm directory.