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

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> >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.
Certainly, it's a *morphological* indicative. But it's equally clearly a
morphological present tense. And from a strictly morphological POV, there's no
reason we couldn't also declare that the construction with 'werden' is always a
(morphological) future, quite regardless of whether its semantic impact is more
modal than tense-like in the typical case.

> >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 didn't suggest a language *couldn't* develop a symmetric future without being
used in a "scientific" context, only one might expect it to be more need for it
in that context. Also, the question arises *when* those language acquired a
symmetric tense system. Unfortunately, I know nothing of the pragmatics of the
Latin future tense.

> I actually thought that English had a future tense as well,
> but now I'm not sure of it any more.
Well, what are the criteria? The 'will' construction is sometimes denied to be a
true future tense on the grounds it carries modal meaning; it indicates intent.
But this, of course, is of little help if we do not want to consider semantics.
The grammatical argument would be that it maps with undoubted modals (like
'can', 'may') rather than (other) analytic tenses.

> 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.
I'm not sure I think there's something necessarily *unnatural* about calquing a
feature from another language. Hm, it occurs to me that one way to acquire a
future tense could be via translationese, if the source language's future is
sufficiently consistently rendered by some suitably futury modal, especially if
the translations are of prestige texts, this purely tense-like use may spread to
other texts and even to speech.

                                                         Andreas