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Darius Jahandarie
Darius Jahandarie
2:10 AM
@snailboat While I'm willing to believe (and certainly have observed) that がの, をの, etc. do not normally occur, I don't think that means there's a rule that disallows/replaces them; there could just as well no reason for them to get generated in the first place. Basically the reason why I was asking about the whole 「〇〇にだ」「〇〇がだ」 type sentences is exactly because these seems like somewhere where they might be generated (which I've never thought of or seen before!).
 
 
17 hours later…
Anonymous
7:04 PM
0
A: In front of "ほうがいい," is it always past tense?

l'électeurFirstly, where did you learn "た = past tense"? In this free online dictionary, for instance, it lists 8 different meanings /usages of 「た」. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E3%81%9F-556028#E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E6.9E.97.20.E7.AC.AC.E4.B8.89.E7.89.88 Sure, you may not be able to read it, but it would at l...

 
Anonymous
> where did you learn "た = past tense"?
 
Anonymous
I think there's some confusion because: ① there are multiple names for things like た, and ② people use the same names with multiple meanings
 
Anonymous
The authors of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language make a distinction between "tense" and "time"
 
Anonymous
They use "tense" as a label for morphological forms (walk, walked)
 
Anonymous
They use "time" as a label for semantic interpretations (situations located in the present, situations located in the past)
 
Anonymous
7:07 PM
What they call the present and past forms in English do not necessarily correspond to present and past time situations, in terms of meaning
 
Anonymous
But they call them present and past "tense" because their primary meaning is to indicate present or past time.
 
Anonymous
This isn't how everyone uses the terms, of course.
 
Anonymous
Many people use "tense" for a kind of semantic interpretation, the way the CGEL authors use "time"
 
Anonymous
But I think the distinction is helpful. If we applied it to Japanese, I think we could say that there are "past" and "nonpast" tenses, even though they have other uses
 
Anonymous
In that sense, Japanese is just like English. The "tense" forms don't always indicate "time" meaning, and there are plenty of other meanings to learn.
 
Anonymous
7:09 PM
The details are different, of course.
 
Anonymous
In both English and Japanese, there are modal meanings, for example, but the modal meanings are quite different.
 
Anonymous
Even the basic "time" meanings are different.
 
Anonymous
I personally would like to say that "た = past tense", because I think that's its primary use in Japanese. But when I say that, I don't mean to exclude other meanings, such as those l'électeur has helpfully pointed out
 
Anonymous
Unfortunately, because people use the term "tense" in different ways, it's difficult for me to communicate that...
 
Anonymous
7:34 PM
0
Q: How do you say "chunky" in Japanese?

duggulousCouldn't find this one in my dictionaries. How would you translate "chunky" into Japanese? As in chunky peanut butter, or, "I left the milk out for 3 days and now it's all chunky".

words
 
Darius Jahandarie
Darius Jahandarie
It's the general problem of using a label with a semantic meaning to refer to a surface form. Is =ga the "subject marker"? Is -i- "continuative"? etc.
(Well, I guess the first example is a syntactic meaning, but either way, "a label that suggests anything more than a morphological meaning"*.)
 
Anonymous
Some linguists make a three-level abstraction for things like が. We have the surface case (nominative), the function (Subject), and the semantic role (e.g. agent)
 
Anonymous
(Some people refer to these as three types of "case", but I'd prefer not to)
 
Darius Jahandarie
Darius Jahandarie
Right.
 
Anonymous
Nominative is like tense, if we agree to make the distinctions I made before; we use the label because its most central purpose is to mark a constituent in Subject function, but we're okay with it having a wider range of functions
 
Anonymous
7:39 PM
Which is helpful if we don't want to end up calling everything "Form1, Form2", and so on :-)
 
Darius Jahandarie
Darius Jahandarie
(Do you mean "nominative" is like "past tense"?)
 
Anonymous
Yeah, actually
 
Anonymous
I should have used a specific tense rather than referring to a system of tense in general
 
Anonymous
Since tense is more analogous to case than to, say, nominative case
 
Anonymous
が・に・を are special as far as case markers go. Some linguists (especially generative linguists) admit only these three as case markers, and call the rest postpositions, because they're different syntactically
 
Anonymous
7:42 PM
Martin, whose description is very detailed but is theoretically a mess, refers to those three as "central" case markers
 
Anonymous
I think that was the term.
 
Darius Jahandarie
Darius Jahandarie
@snailboat I see what you're saying, but I don't fully agree. The word "nominative" means nothing to most people I think. It's sort of just a label which suggests certain non-morphemic things (once you do enough linguistics) but inherently is just identifying a morpheme. The term "past tense" seems much more like it's indicating semantics directly, which I think is where the problem is coming from the pragmatic perspective.
If we used "subject case" instead of "nominative" I think we'd see the same issue there.
In other words, when a morpheme primarily serves a given function or has a given meaning, putting that function/meaning in the label for the morpheme pretty much always leads to confusion of that label indicating the function/meaning rather than the morpheme.
 

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