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From: elna@netcom.com (Esperanto League N America)
Subject: Re: singular/plural *not* universal?
Message-ID: <elnaDxnMFv.GpJ@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <19960906104751.baaa005GL@babyblue.cs.yale.edu> <19960906104750.aaaa005GL@babyblue.cs.yale.edu> <elnaDxCsBy.FBG@netcom.com> <runderhill-1209961201100001@underhill.sdsu.edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 04:43:06 GMT
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runderhill@mail.sdsu.edu (Robert Underhill) writes in a recent posting (reference <runderhill-1209961201100001@underhill.sdsu.edu>):
>
>The auxiliary 'will' can be omitted from future time sentences if
>(a) there is a specific time adverb; (b) the event is one that can be
>planned or scheduled in advance.
>
This is useful, and yet it still leaves me wanting. If Chinese (say) has
a set of rules (or rather, if one can construct a set of rules referring
to Chinese) which establishes conditions under which one need not use a
future marker, can we then say that Chinese has a future tense *except
for the following circumstances*?   
 
     [I had written the following]

>> I have often heard the seemingly radical concept that English has no
>> future tense, but I had thought that the reason for this assertion was the
>> need of the auxiliary verb: run, ran, *will* run.
>
>This is a different issue.  Latin and the Romance languages for
>instance have a number of different tenses that are expressed
>by verbal endings, such as present, past, future, imperfect etc.
>English and most other Germanic languages have a different
>system, by which there are only two tenses expressed on the
>verb, present/past ('walk/walked, run/ran') and other meanings
>are expressed with modals such as 'will'.  The term "future tense"
>is used about English partly because Latin had a future tense
>and traditional grammar is largely Latin grammar.
>
Yes, indeed. And it is not a category shift to assert that "Chinese has a 
future tense" because it can be conveniently (albeit imperfectly) mapped
onto the Latin/IE model. Of course Chinese usage is not the same as Latin
(or even English), but to assert that "Chinese has no tenses" is a form of
linguistic imperialism:  "my mapping is better than your mapping".

>> Is there not a fuzzy border between grammatical and lexical? 
-- 
Miko SLOPER                   elna@netcom.com         USA  (510) 653 0998
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