I am looking for a good, universal definition of grammatical tense. I don’t want it have an English bias, Latin bias or IE bias. I am also trying to define something to do with the difference between semantic temporal deixis and morphosyntactically marked tense.
I’m afraid that you will have to start with a thorough investigation of the difference between aspect and Aktionsart, define them, and then address the interplay between those two and tense.
To my horror, I begin to use almost existentialistic terms: Tense has something to do with time-spoken-of in relation to time-spoken-at (absolute tense) or to other points of time (relative rense).
Then there are some interesting cultural and psychological angles. Is a Chinese listener smarter or more receptive than a European, or why do they use sematic deixis (and only when the need is felt), but we have to specify time.
[quote author=Garzo link=board=grammar;num=1103748928;start=0#2 date=12/22/04 at 20:21:55]Thanks, Sitran.
Can anyone help with noun tense in Japanese? I’ve heard it exists, but haven’t a clue how it works.
- Garzo.
Me neither, with my brain 100% configured to Japanese and with some knowledge of linguistics. Perhaps you could share some examples? I am glad to decipher them.
Ah, I’ve got a very cryptic footnote that suggests that tense can be marked on Japanese adjectives. I can glean ‘shiroi’, ‘shirokatta’ and ‘shirokute’. I’m not sure if this is tense marking, and if it was what it would look like. It also suggests that it occurs in the Potawatomi Native American (Michigan, I think) language (past-tense markers are applied to the names of deceased relatives).
Thanks, Anders, for your existential descent. I am beginning to wonder what aspect is. Traditionally, I think of it as the flow of time (all that linear and puntiliar stuff), where tense just gives a referrence point (be it absolute, relative or hybrid). However, I’m beginning to wonder if aspect isn’t just some secondary fine tuning of tense. The two things do get quite confused. Then there’s Aktionsart, which is sometimes different again. Would it be better to start from a definition of temporal deixis in language and move into each of these concepts from there?
I am primarily indebted to the Sw Natl Encyclopedia and Siegfried Lienhard: Tempusgebrauch und Aktionsartenbildung in der modernen Hindi for what follows. (Another book to check out is, according to Lienhard, Horst Renicke: Die Theorie der Aspekte und Aktionsarten and perhaps also Max Deuschbein: Aspekte und Aktionsarten im Neuenglischen. There is also a more recent, massive tome, edited by Östen Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems.)
Aktionsarten are verbal constructions, describing the general characteristics of actions, as objectively stated by the speaker. A personal involvement of the speaker is possible, but subordinate. Examples of Aktionsarten are starting (ingressive-inchoative), instantaneous, continuing (progressive-continuative) and ending (egressive-conclusive).
Aspects are kinds of time perspectives which describe the speaker’s view, like perfective, progressive or habitual.
Lienhard regards tenses (at least in Hindi) as secondary phenomena that relate originally aspect carrying forms to time domains. "A tense" originates "by a kind of linear interpretation of a localized aspect". (My translation of Lienhard’s quoting F. Rundgren: Intensiv und Aspektkorrelation. Studien zur äthiopischen und akkadischen Verbalstammbildung.)
Finally, it seems that Jerzy Kury[s]l[/s]owicz in Aspect et temps dans l’histoire du persan, and his L’apophonie en indo-européen discusses the pair of opposites imperfective-perfective in an interesting way, assigning different symbols consisting of combinations of Greek letters and subscripts to, for example, I write, I am writing, I have written, I have been writing, I wrote, I was writing, I had written and I had been writing.
Obviously, this subject fascinates and intrigues me, but now I really have to wrap Xmas prezzies. Season’s Greetings to all of you.
I wonder if Aktionsart is always lexical and objective. Some seem to prefer to describe it as lexical rather than grammatical, while others play the objective/subjective card. I think I’m most at home with the definition that it is the stative/dynamic property of utterance. I say ‘utterance’ rather than ‘verb phrase’ because (even in English) it can be marked by other parts of speech. I wonder if some languages have morphological Aktionsart, or is that just going against the grain?
There seem to be a good few languages that place more importance on aspect than tense. I believe this is the case with proto-Semitic, and it seems to be the case with Hindi as well. Sometimes Semitic languages feel as if they are based on a past and non-past system, but perfective and imperfective is probably a better representation.
Can’t resist looking…
[quote author=Garzo link=board=grammar;num=1103748928;start=0#9 date=12/23/04 at 14:53:34]I wonder if Aktionsart is always lexical and objective.
So do I. The impenetrable Swedish Grammar by the Ryl. Sw. Academy is hopelessly confused about those terms, IMnot soHO.
I wonder if some languages have morphological Aktionsart, or is that just going against the grain?
I’m afraid that this question requires a definition of "word"... Hindi uses verbs, lots of them in a row, to express subtle shades of meaning, but who am I to tell if they are verb forms as separate words, or if they can be classified as inflectional morphemes? The most common term is "compound verbs", but I don’t find any consensus on the interpretation of usages. Compare the general nonspecific gâ.ri caltî hai "the train gone is" ‘the train goes’ or gâ.rî caltî thî "the train gone was" ‘the train went’ with gâ.rî cal dî "train went gave" ‘the train left’, in principle stressing that the action concerns somebody else than the doer, and the more sudden gâ.rî cal pa.rî "train went fell (preterite of ‘fall’)" ‘the train began to move’.
This is interesting to compare to the Chinese general notion of going (away) chu, the completed/accomplished (perfective?) having gone laile, the having gone once laiguo or the ongoing going laizhe.
[Semitic] perfective and imperfective is probably a better representation.
Agreed! Somebody wrote that modern Hebrew is copying the European notion of tenses, but Arabic and Bible Hebrew sure use (im)perfective.
On a side note, this explains lots of Bible translation problems and differing opinions. Will you (assuredly) get this land, or are you in the process of getting it, or did you just get it?
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages.
Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.
[quote author=Garzo link=board=grammar;num=1103748928;start=0#6 date=12/23/04 at 08:08:03]I can glean ‘shiroi’, ‘shirokatta’ and ‘shirokute’. I’m not sure if this is tense marking, and if it was what it would look like.
Japanese adjectives are conjugated in the same paradigm as verbs, although the two parts of speech have different inflectional forms for the same paradigm. To tell you the truth I am not very comfortable using the word conjugation in Japanese grammar for the paradigm is not defined by such features as are common in European and Semitic languages; person, number, gender etc. For detail please refer first to my then-irrelevant posts in Ottoman Turkish thead.
I will show a part of Japanese conjugational paradigm just to contrast conjugations of verbs and adjectives (hyphen separates the stem and the inflectional affix).
Present or unmarked tense
shiro-i (am/are/is white) (< CJ shiroshi)
kam-u (I/you/he/she/they bite)
After-Noun-Clause form
shiro-i N (a/the white N) (< CJ shiroki)
kam-u N (a/the N that bites)
Past test or perfect aspect
shiro-katta (was/were white) (< shiroku-atta; white-existed morphologically)
kan-da (I/you/he/she they bit) (< kam-ta; morphologically)
After-Negation form in the unmarked tense
shiro-ku nai (white not); the negative word nai is another adjective.
kam-a nai (do/does not bite)
And-Form (I suspect this is adverbialisation)
shiro-ku te kuroi (am/is/are white and black)
kan-de taberu (bite and eat = awkward masticate)
that[quote author=Flaminius link=board=grammar;num=1103748928;start=0#13 date=12/25/04 at 08:23:45]...
Clear as mud?
On the contrary, Flam, your exposition is, as expected, as clear (to use an old Swedish expression) as the water in which sausages have been cooked. But I confess myself a little confused by the examples given by Anders to illustrate aspect in Chinese verbs
This is interesting to compare to the Chinese general notion of going (away) chu, the completed/accomplished (perfective?) having gone laile, the having gone once laiguo or the ongoing going laizhe.
But why the switch of verbs, from «chu» («qu» ?) to «lai» ? In any event, the use of the particle «zhe» after verbs is especially interesting, but it is important not to identify such combinations with an English progressive tense. Thus a dialogue of the type
What are you doing ? - I’m eating.
would be rendered in Chinese by
Ni zuo shemma ? - (Wo) chifan.
rather than by
Ni zuozhe shemme ? - (Wo) chizhe fan.
In my experience, «zhe» is most often suffixed to a verb to indicate that it serves as ongoing background to the action desribed by another verb. Thus the phrase mentioned by Flam on another thread
I have once heard a chinese comment on his compatriot students of Japanese, "xiao3 zhao2 jin3, ku2 zhao2 chu2." In a peculiar parallel to Henri’s expression it means "laughing enter but crying exit."
which I, however, would transliterate slightly differently, as follows :
«Xiao4zhe0 jin4, ku1zhe0 chu1».
Indeed, if I may speculate, I can’t help wondering if the «te» suffix in Japanese
And-Form (I suspect this is adverbialisation)
shiro-ku te kuroi (am/is/are white and black)
kan-de taberu (bite and eat = awkward masticate)
is not, in fact, derived from this use of the particle «zhe» in Chinese. Let us hope that that Chinese Otto Jespersen of the Japanese language does turn up while we are still around to benefit !...
I have been wondering if any difference can be observed between the adjectival and verbal conjugations while I took a bath. Like Archimedes’ eureka I was visited by epiphany or majnun.
Myself
And-Form (I suspect this is adverbialisation)
shiro-ku te kuroi (am/is/are white and black)
kan-de taberu (bite and eat = awkward masticate)
Verbs can form request expressions with this te-form. E.g., kande kudasai (Please bite) kudasai < CJ kudasare; polite to give; imperative.
I consider this usage somewhat akin to English expressions like "ask you to bite," although the subject to the infinitive is not explicitly shown in the Japanese counterpart.
However, an adjective in te-form before a verb is ungrammatical.
E.g., *shiroku-te kudasai.
In order for any form of imperative/request expression using adjectives to be grammatical, a verb in te-form should intervene between the adjective and the main verb.
Thus, some examples of such expressions are;
shiroku-natte kudasai. (natte < naru; become)
Become white, please.
shiroku-s h i t e kudasai. (s h i t e < suru; do or make)
Make it/him/yourself/etc. white, please.
For convenience of those who intend to commit Internet search, I favoured the term te-form in this post. This is the most dominant appellation in the literature (In our examples the verb kande is the result of forward assimilation like kami-te > kamte > kande).
My conviction is, though, that this is advervialisation for it is "suffixed to a verb to indicate that it serves as ongoing background to the action (M._Henri_Day)." I don’t see any problem in including infinitive-like use of te-form in advervialisation. In view of the history that the English to-infinitive also started out from an adverbial phrase (constructed by virtue of preposition to), this may not be so wild a speculation.
