What is Tense? #1

Damkerng T.

Jul 13, 2015 19:27

yesterday, by Damkerng T.

For tomorrow (or the day after): Back to the basic: What is tense?

A tense is a grammatical form that locates a situation in time—for example, past, present, or future. — snailboat 2 days ago

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

What is intense? Opposite of tense?

Damkerng T.

> 6.2 The inflectional tense system
We have seen that there are two inflectional tenses in English: preterite and present.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/overview.html

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

If tense is a locator, what is a ɘƨnɘƚ?

Damkerng T.

> Tense What does tense mean? In this case, it means that you can look at the form of the verbs played and likes and tell that the events or states conveyed in the sentences took place at different times [...] Tense is a system of marking on the first verb of a finite VP to indicate whether the event or state held in the past or it holds in the present or future (what might be called the non-past). English has two tenses, which are traditionally called past and present.

> public.wsu.edu/~gordonl/Grammar_Book/Chapter_2.pdf

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I think I can understand the difference between tense and aspect.

Or I think I can.

Damkerng T.

Jul 13, 2015 19:31

> He would have done it differently. -- What tense is it in?

> Sit down. -- What tense is that?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I give up.

Damkerng T.

How about: They used to be here?

Or: Only if it was/were real...

Or: I'd rather she helped him.

Or: I had better keep trying.

Or: Here be dragons.

Are some of these (above) atense or non-tensed?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Am not gonna make assertions on this one.

Maybe they're dealt with differently.

Damkerng T.

nods

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

This very question popped in my mind a while ago.

Damkerng T.

Jul 13, 2015 19:42

> In Latin and Greek and any inflected language, "tense" usually
means a paradigmatic set of affixes that refers (often obliquely)
to time in some sense. The English word "tense" comes from
Latin "tempus", after all. But English is almost uninflected,
unlike Latin, and there are really only two inflectional tenses,
on the Latin model, left: present (am/are/is, go(es), walk(s), etc.)
and past [purists may prefer "aorist"] (was/were, went, walked, etc.).

> www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/tense.html

> Besides those, there are innumerable possible phrases formable
from auxiliaries like (forms of) "be", "have", "do", "will", "would",
"must", "might", "may", "shall", "should", "can", "could", "go",
"come", "let", "ought", "get", etc. These can co-occur in so
many combinations that it seems wasteful to assign special names
to each combination. And most English "traditional tenses" (i.e,
the tenses that are "sort of the same as" the 6 tenses Latin had:
present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect)

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I do hope there be an ELL blog in a future.

Damkerng T.

nods -- This half-blog half-chat (chblog?) may be useful as a seed of the blog. :-)

> [...]

> There really isn't any such thing as "the X tense" in a general sense. All
languages have their own repertory of forms and grammatical constructions,
and some of them may make sense when considered as "tense"; others don't.

But how about such "past" "tenses" as:

Past Necessitive              I had to go
Past Usitative                I used to go
Past Intentional              I was going to go
Past Potential                I might have gone
Past Potential Progressive    I might have been going
Past Potential Necessitive    I might have had to go
Past Potential Intentional    I might have been going to go
Past Perfect Intentional      I had been going to go
Past Perfect Necessitive      I had had to go
Past Usitative Necessitive    I used to have to go

> ... etc. There are lots more English auxiliaries left to conjugate, and
plenty more Latin grammatical terms where these came from. This is one
of the big reasons why Latin grammar isn't a great model for English
grammar; Latin is inflected (it "has a tense system"), and English isn't.
Anybody who feels (as many do) that these aren't "real" tenses is using a
sense of "tense" that isn't terribly defensible in modern English.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Cooooooooooooooooooooooool!!!one eleven111!!!1!

Damkerng T.

> [...]

> "Tense" comes from "tempus" ('time'); when you change the verb itself
(not just add another word to it, but actually change ["inflect"] it) to
refer to time, you got a tense.

> Change the verb itself to show how true it is, you got a "mood", like
Subjunctive, Indicative, Optative, Benedictive ["May this house be safe
from tigers"].

> Change the verb itself to show your viewpoint, you got an "aspect", like
Progressive, Usitative, Inceptive ["He started to leave"].

> Change the verb itself to show agency (who did what to whom), you got a
"voice", like Passive, Active, Mediopassive, Reflexive,

> Everything else that doesn't actually produce a different verb form
(as opposed to another word in the phrase) *isn't* yet another "tense",
but rather verb phrase syntax. English verbs are notoriously simple
in terms of their inflection, but getting all the verb phrases right is
a nightmare.

> [...]

> Well, no, not really. First, tense only "has to do with" or "comes
from" time. It doesn't really "communicate" or "refer" to it. For
instance, the so-called "present" tense (Bill walks to school) isn't
really about the present time at all. It's generic, describing a
characteristic activity of the subject, which is more than likely
not being indulged in at the present moment. You want that, you
should use the "present progressive" (present tense, progressive
aspect: Bill is walking to school).

> Second, the "requirement" is essentially a distinction between
morphology and syntax, the two kinds of grammar. Morphology is what
shows up in paradigms of the amo, amas, amat or he, him, his variety; it
refers to the *internal* economy of words, how they're formed and
changed and the regular, paradigmatic changes they go through. Syntax,
on the other hand, refers to the *external* economy of words, their
relative order, which ones can be used together, which ones *must* be
used together, what kind of morphology is governed in each case,

> [...] In the nuclear Verb Phrase (before getting to the complicated stuff), there can be up to 4 of these constructions, in a rigid order:

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. What's this?

Hehe.

Damkerng T.

Jul 13, 2015 19:53

   Modals     Perfect        Progressive      Passive       Main Verb
1)  *    + Infinitive
2)            have    +  Past Participle
3)                            be      +   Present Participle
4)                                              be         +  Past Part.
(* = may might can could shall should will would must)
All of these go before the Main Verb, the one that means something
lexically instead of grammatically.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I use [...] to indicate that something in the original was left out.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Dam an idea: Next time you bring in a big big discussion, pin the main question in question.

Damkerng T.

> [...]

> The best source for this is the late lamented Jim McCawley's
classic article "Tense and Time Reference in English", pp 96-113 of Studies in Linguistic Semantics, edited by Fillmore and Langendoen. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1971.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Oh, you mean, like a topic?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. I'm gonna do some reading in a near future. . .

@DamkerngT. Ahan. Am eating a salad so my sentences are. . .Fragged.

Damkerng T.

I didn't have a fixed plan about it going to be big or small, but...

You may find this page useful: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/24938/…

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I always do.

Damkerng T.

Jul 13, 2015 20:12

From Longman English Grammar by L. G. Alexander (1988; 12th impression 1995):

> 9 Verbs, verb tenses, imperatives
General information about verbs and tenses

9.1 What a verb is and what it does

> A verb is a word (run) or a phrase (run out of) which expresses the existence of a state (love, seem) or the doing of an action (take, play). Two facts are basic:

> 1. Verbs are used to express distinctions in time (past, present, future) through tense (often with adverbials of time or frequency).

> 2. Auxiliary verbs [> 10.1] are used with full verbs to give other information about actions and states. For example be may be used with the present participle of a full verb to say that an action was going on ('in progress') at a particular time (I was swimming); have may be used with the past participle of a full verb to say that an action is completed (I have finished).

9.2 Verb tenses: simple and progressive

> Some grammarians believe that tense must always be shown by the actual form of the verb, and in many languages present, past and future are indicated by changes in the verb forms. On this reckoning, English really has just two tenses, the present and the past, since these are the only two cases where the form of the basic verb varies: love, write (present); loved, wrote (past).

> However, it is usual (and convenient) to refer to all combinations of be + present participle and have + past participle as tenses. The same goes for will + bare infinitive [> 16.3] to refer to the future (It will be fine tomorrow). But we must remember that tense in English is often only loosely related to time.

> Tenses have two forms, simple and progressive (sometimes called 'continuous'). The progressive contains be + present participle:

> [... examples ...]

> Both simple and progressive forms usually give a general idea of when an action takes place. But the progressive forms also tell us that an activity is (or was, or will be, etc.) in progress, or thought of as being in progress.

Interesting that the book says English has two tenses too, but it mixes tenses with aspects.

> English really has just two tenses, the present and the past ...

> Tenses have two forms, simple and progressive ...

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