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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: English verb tenses
Message-ID: <D5FBwH.700@tigadmin.ml.com>
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Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <3jvunv$o1f@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 09:33:52 GMT
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In article o1f@netnews.upenn.edu, ccardona@mail2.sas.upenn.edu (Maelstrom) writes:
>Pascal MacProgrammer (stevemac@bud.indirect.com) wrote:
>: Not so very long ago, eassong@yorku.ca (Gord Easson) said...
>
>: >Let me throw my support in here.  As far as I know, it is generally
>: >accepted that English has two tenses of which future is NOT one.  Of all
>: >the possible names for them, I think I would go for Past and Non-past
>: >(someone mentioned this terminology earlier in the thread).
>
>:   Well, then, it must be the =American= language that has six tenses.  At 
>: least, in grammar school, I was taught that the language we were speaking 
>: has six tenses.
>
>i remember 12.

Well there's "I go" and "I went" and, er...  I think the point is that it's
not clear whether we should count "I will go" as the future tense of "go"
or as a phrase made from two verbs.  After all, if "I will go" is the future
tense why isn't "I must go" the "debitive(?) tense" and "I can go" the
"potentive(??) tense" -- the answer is probably that Latin has a single form
corresponding to "I will go" but no single form corresponding to "I can go"
-- hardly a scientific basis for deciding how many tenses English has.

(I know that linguists do have ways of answering questions such as these.
I read a fascinating book on the Georgian language by A. Harris(?) in
which she discussed criteria for identifying the grammatical subject in a
language.  I didn't understand much of it but I think the issue was as follows:

Georgian is an ergative language, which in crude terms means that the subject
of an intransitive verb takes the same form as the object of a transitive verb,
not (as in English) the same form as the subject (i.e. they say "me go" rather
than "I go").  The patterns are roughly:

    he-AGENT likes she-PATIENT
    she-PATIENT goes

Typcially -AGENT is marked by putting the noun in the "ergative case" and
-PATIENT by leaving it in the "nominative".

The question is: Are we right to call "he" the subject of the first sentence?
Maybe, the verb we've translated as "likes" is actually passive so that a literal
translation would be "she is liked by him", making "she" the subject.

This raises the question of what we mean by "grammatical subject" and how we can
distinguish the subject from the object etc..  Harris mentions several criteria,
most of which meant nothing to me.  There was one that made sense: reflexivization
-- in a reflexive sentence the subject remains in its normal form and the non-subject
takes on a special reflexive form.  Thus, the fact that we say "I wash myself" and
not "I-self wash me" suggests that "I" is indeed the subject.  The same is true of
the passive: "I am washed by myself" not "I-self am washed by me".

Thus, if the reflexive pattern in Georgian is "he-AGENT likes he-REFLEXIVE-PATIENT"
then "he-AGENT" is the subject and ergative languages are different from others.
Whereas if it  is "he-REFLEXIVE-AGENT likes he-PATIENT" then "he-PATIENT" is really the
subject and we're just dealing with a passive verb: the verb we've been translating
as "like" really means "be liked by".

The answer was that ergative languages are different...)

As for the number of tenses in English I reckon there are 4 * 2 * 2:

4: present, future, past, conditional
2: continuous, non-continuous
2: perfective, imperfective

Thus the continuous perfective conditional of "to go" is "I would have been going".

-- julian pardoe --  



