Re: Tense and aspect (was: savoir-connaître)

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 18:40:45 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
>
>> On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 09:50:45 -0500, Mark Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>>
>> >On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 09:06:06 -0500, J. 'Mach' Wust
>
>> >> In German, it's common not to use the present tense for
>> >> future actions. (There are indeed linguists who say that the use of
>> >> the "werden" periphrasis as an expression of the future tense is a
>> >> latinizing invention, and that its meaning is rather modal.)
>> >
>> >Pardon?
>>
>> What a mess I've made! In German, it's very common to express the future
>> time by the present tense form. The hypothesis I've alluded to is that
>> the construction of the auxiliary _werden_ ('become') + verb has been
>> given the future tense meaning by grammarians who wanted the German
>> language to be more like Latin with a future tense of its own. The
>> supposedly more genuine modal meaning of the werden-construction is an
>> expression of supposition, as in:
>>
>> Er wird schon gestern angekommen sein. 'I guess he has already arrived
>> yesterday.' (if we translate the werden-construction with a
>> will-construction: 'He will have arrived already yesterday'; literally:
>> 'He becomes already yesterday arrived be')
>
>On of the things spending a year in Germany did to my German was to make me
>think of this, rather than the temporal, as the primary function of the
>'werden' construction. At least where I was (Aachen), _werden_ as a future
>former seems to be rare in spoken standard German.
It's interesting that you, a foreigner sensitive to linguistics, support
this view! I think I read somewhere that most expressions of future time in
German don't use the werden-construction but plain indicative. I guess that
the werden-construction is marked in some other way.


>Now, true future
>indicative meaning is pragmatically rare as such, and I'd like to put a
>question mark at the supposition that constructions like like _Ich geh'
>morgen ins Kino_ really are semantically *indicative*; they're declarations
>of intent, not prophecies.
The semantics may be discussed. However, to me, the term "indicative" is is
not semantical, but grammatical. And there's no doubt that this construction
is a grammatical indicative.

I've learnt to distinguish the terms for tense and time, for numerus and
number, for genus and gender, for aspect and aktionsart, etc., and I think
that these distinctions, even though many don't make them, are very useful
when talking about grammar, since they allow me to assert that e.g. all
languages express time, but not all have tense.


>Perhaps, if the werden-as-future is really calqued from Latin, the
>prompting wasn't so much a desire to make the language Latin-like as a goal
>in itself, but in order to fill a very pragmatic need in "philosophical"
>writings for a form that isn't really needed in "everyday" speech.
>
>If I'm forgiven for babbling on about psycholinguistic matters of I know
>little, it seems to me that a symmetric past-present-future tense system
>suggests a similarly symmetric view of time, which puts past and future on
>a basically equal footing. I think I speak for most people if I say a such
>view doesn't square very well with naive human perception. It should thus
>not be surprising if most languages don't have a symmetric tense system,
>which, from what little I know of typologic, actually is also the case. But
>it should also not be surprising if a language used for
>philosophico-scientific purposes where a symmetric "block" image of time is
>employed acquires ways to refer to tense more symmetrically.
I disagree. Latin wasn't a philosophico-scientific conlang, but a normal
natlang, and so are Spanish and French and non-Romance languages that have a
future tense. I actually thought that English had a future tense as well,
but now I'm not sure of it any more.

An utterance about a future event doesn't have the same level of facticity
like an utterance about present or past events, but that doesn't hinder many
languages to naturally develop a future tense.

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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