news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7843058.stm

@snailboat Thank you :)

> We have already discussed it yesterday.

:)

@DamkerngT. All the answer posts over there have 0 overall votes. :)

Hello! Anyone out here?

@LasciviousGrace Hello! Welcome to the chat room!

Thank You!

I was curious about something, didn't know what the best place to ask would be, so got here

Please ask away. Answering is not guaranteed, though. :-)

Sure thing!

I noticed, very recently, the unread message notification lights up(in red) on my SE pages, even when I have no unread messages. Interestingly, this seems to be happening since the SE sites were taken down for maintenance yesterday.

So, I was wondering, if this "phenomenon" seems to be a one-off incident(with me only), or has anyone else faced this too.

Hmm... I didn't notice that yesterday.

But sometimes it happens for another reason...

which is the comment's owner happens to have their own comment deleted.

Oh, I'm afraid that isn't the thing, in my case

Well, I don't really know how to "show" this peculiar situation. Not sure if a screenshot would help.

It could, but I'm not the best person who knows much about how SE works.

Someone else might.

Yes, I understand

Regardless, thanks for tuning in!

No problem. I'm glad to see you in here. The more the merrier!

Same here! :)

Ah, all right. Thanks for this, @snailboat. I thought of posting on meta, but was unsure about it, thinking it might be deemed off-topic

Sounds great :-) Thanks a ton!

@LasciviousGrace I think I now got the same bug. :)

@da

@DamkerngT. Ah, lucky you!!

:)

hello all;

hi

. . . yawn . . .

Oh, hmm . . .

Well, it was a start.

(cont.) So, the simple past-tense is a point in the past? Is that right? (e.g. "I ate")

(cont.) So let's see how that works. For example:

@LasciviousGrace Me, too. I'm up to 5 messages now. I wish that would go away.

(cont.) 1. "I wish I knew if this painting was genuine."

(cont.) So, what point(s) in the past are those two simple past-tense verbs pointing to?

(cont.) I looks like them past-tense verbs are all referring to the present.

(cont.) Uh, oh. Hmm.

Looks to me like they're pointing to continuing states which are not in the present or anywhen else.

(cont.) Don't past-tense verbs always refer to the past? . . . Or do they?

<grumble>verbs do not have tense. utterances have tense.</grumble>

What verbs have is form.

(cont.) 2. "You said that the finals started tomorrow."

(cont.) So, when are the finals support to start? In the past? . . . Or the future?!

(cont.) So, confusing. :D

@StoneyB You just got your 2002 CGEL recently, yes? :)

Could you tell us the "last printed" date on it? Is it "Reprinted with corrections 2008"?

Dang, my iMac error-correction for my typing is making my comments so confusing. :(

My hard copy is at work - I picked it up secondhand and it's pretty beat up. At home I work off the 'pirate' version on archive.org (actually, I found that first and liked it so much I went looking for a copy I could afford to legitimate my using it). The archive.org version says 5th printing 2012.

Uh, oh, that's bad news for me. (Unless . . . there have been no more "with corrections" in those later printings. Otherwise, my copy will be out-dated.)

There are certainly some oddities here and there. We have a user, Listenever, who occasionally posts questions about CGEL passages that don't make any sense to her, or me either.

@StoneyB I see. I'm still stuck at (2) since yesterday, no idea why.

"You said that the finals started tomorrow"? I'd take that to be an indirect-speech backshift of "start".

With future reference.

Future-tense clause with present-tense form verb backshifted to past-tense form.

@StoneyB So, are you saying that clauses and verbs both have tense?

@StoneyB So would I.

No, but it's hard to express exactly what I mean: the forms have common names which reflect their primary use, and which are so dominant in pedagogy you have to use them to be understood at all. Perhaps this: future-tense clause with VERB^Pr backshifted to VERB^Pa.

The 'tense' that, for instance, John Lawler talks about is a grammatical feature of finite verbs which coincides only occasionally with the 'tense' which is a semantic feature exhibited by clauses; and both differ from the 'tense' which everybody except linguists talks about, which is any of the variety of forms which a verb may take or constructions into which it may enter.

Yeah, there are so many definitions it makes no sense to use one and assume your interlocutors or readers use the same.

@StoneyB Many modern grammars use the term "preterite" for the simple past-tense verb form, and so, maybe a new term could be used to refer to the present-tense verb forms if you wanted to separate your meaning of "tense" from that of the verb forms?

@F.E. I've toyed with that; but here on ELL how many people know the word preterite? I only know it because I took Latin in middle school.

Ita est.

--reinforced by a year in an Austrian Realgymnasium where they used Präteritum. And when you want to speak of the 'present' forms what do you use to signify "base form with any situationally required person/number inflection" as distinguished from "base form without further inflection" as distinguished from "infinitive form"?

Nomenclature is a mess. I may have to learn OE so I can find out what Ælfric used!

<grump>Probably calques, which is where the whole problem began.</grump>

@StoneyB The base form could also be known as the plain form. The two present-tense forms: the plain present, the 3rd singular present. The plain form is used in imperatives, subjunctives, and infinitivals.

@F.E. That's CGEL's solution, I think; but with BE the 'plain present' is unrelated to the 'plain form'. And what term embraces 'plain present' and '3rd singular present' and excludes 'infinitival'?

Well, present.

There's no need to reinvent perfectly practical nomenclature...

@StoneyB The infinitival is a construction, while the other terms are for verb forms.

@Cerberus Which gets us back where we started. "I'll talk with you tomorrow when I am free". That's a 'present' form with future reference. Pedagogically it's not so practical as I would like.

@F.E. Quite so. I have confused myself again. If that happens to me, what happens to our elves?

@StoneyB Just to point out, no rep change notifications now either!

@LasciviousGrace Hmm ... I've got a green number, but it seems to have nothing to do with what is listed as accruing since last time I was there.

Has anybody asked about this on whatever-the-SE-general-Meta-is-called-now?

I get the feeling this is somehow related to the maintenance activities performed yesterday.

LOL, "whatever-the-SE-general-Meta-is-called-now?"- good one!

I went over to Meta.SE and saw somebody saying you can clear your boxes by opening them there - I opened a Meta.SE account, and it works.

For now, anyway.

Ah well, at least we now know it is indeed a bug.

Gracious - where are all these questions coming from? There are now 25 with no answers.

@StoneyB Well, ideally, we would have syntactic markers that always indicated the same semantic reference. But this not being the case, we use present for certain syntactic things that we closely associate with a certain semantic role, even though strictly it is independent from semantics.

@Cerberus Fersher. NSs don't have any real problem with this, because they already 'know' the grammar practically; the names are more or less transparent. But it makes formal grammar an obstacle for NNSs, because they're trying to learn the language through the names. I'd love to find a terminology for them (ideally English- rather than Latin- or Greek-based) that makes the names themselves informative.

@snailboat Which is fine if you're going to get the entire book into your curriculum, and take care to warn learners the labels are just names, not definitions. But how many of our questions here turn on the learners taking the names for definitions? I'd guess about a quarter ...

I love "-ing form", because it is both descriptive and unambiguous; but as you say, none of the other morphological variants can be treated the same way. "Non-past" disambiguates in some contexts; but a "past" form is equally "non-past" when it represents some sort of current- or future-relative irrealis.

Me, I say it is in those terms both ... But the real problem, I think, is that those forms don't actually have 'meanings'. The 'meanings' -- the time and aspect references -- are to my mind properties of utterances; the particular forms employed are not so much expressive of the meanings as concordant with them.

CGEL, it seems (I'm struggling through at about five pages a day) makes occasional nods towards this understanding; I wish they had put it more front-and-center.

Yeah, snailboat, what is it? (Glad Arrowfar asked you and not me!) ... On which note I am going to go seek détente. Ta, all.

@StoneyB The problem is that, if you want to remove any semantic reference that isn't 100% applicable, you are probably left with morphological descriptions, lik -ing form. This can be useful. However, a link to something more tangible, with a semantic reference based on its "primary" function, makes it easier to remember. And in the case of the present tense, no morphological description like -ing form is possible.

And perhaps it is a good lesson for learners to know that names are often not fully aligned with functions.

A screwdriver is not called a screwdriver-cum-paint-can-opener-cum-murder-weapon, even though it is.

facepaw

@Arrowfar The sentence is conditional. So would is probably past subjunctive, and the dependent clause is probably simple past (indicative).

@snailboat You are most wise. Do you also insist on dictionary definitions being complete corpora of how the word has been used?

Because, after all, the definition of a word is really the way it is used.

@Arrowfar Um I'm not sure I would say "past conditional", but if I had to I would say past.

@snailboat You are right.

Of what?

> If you were my mother, I would give you a pencil that was made of wood.

So there you have condition, main clause, (non-condition) subordinate clause.

@snailboat I might give them nothing? Or tennis rackets?

So the idea is that subordinate clauses depending on a main conditional clause with would can backshift to use the simple past.

@snailboat Not past time reference, but the "simple past" nonetheless.

Here we go again...

This is why Stone doesn't like "past".

@snailboat Yeah, I think he doesn't fully understand that syntactic things like "simple past" can be used to describe situations that are not in the past.

@Arrowfar That is entirely different.

That is no subordinate clause.

And would is not conditional there, or at least not like a normal conditional: it is called habitual will/would.

It indicates a habit.

So would is no past subjunctive there, but a simple past describing the actual past (as opposed to conditionals, which usually do not describe a situation in the past).

OK good.

Yup!

Kind of.

Sometimes I can't help myself.

@snailboat There is a zoom button on the top left corner

so did I the first time

@snailboat perhaps a comma would help

Oh, I missed that

@snailboat or they aren't proofread by a professional editor (self-publishing anyone?)

Shameless is a good trait for learning

I don't believe that

@snailboat It also helps being a good communicator

@snailboat Oh, I can now imagine some of my most daring quotes about snails haunting me back in the future.

hi

@snailboat Same here. And the Apple stuff...

@DamkerngT. How does this following sentence sound to your metallic ears:

> "We have already discussed it yesterday."

@DamkerngT. Does it sound acceptable to you? (Notice the past time adjunct "yesterday" and the present perfect construction.)

@Arrowfar Hello :)

There are so many somewhat similar questions, but they often differ in some important ways.

That one sounds so familiar, but I've had difficulty in trying to find a grammar reference that specifically matches that question.

The OP's example is:

> "You, not they/them, are responsible for that."