Re: Tense marked on nouns

Mark P. Line scripsit:

> But there are other temporal relations expressed in these examples as
> well. It's *yesterday's* paper, and the *former* president. These nouns
> are not being marked for *tense*, which is a clause-level category,
> because "yesterday's" and "former" are just modifying the noun -- not
> expressing clause-level relations of any kind.
>
> (The literature on the subject is confusing because some linguists have
> chosen to refer to certain kinds of noun morphology as "nominal tense"
> because it has to do with time. I do not follow this practice, and
> discourage others from doing so on ontological grounds.)
In Lojban, however, where most NPs are VPs with determiners on them,
it does make sense to use the word "tense" in this situation: the markers
are those of clause-level tense because the NPs themselves
mean "that of which <whatever> is predicated".

--
You escaped them by the will-death              John Cowan
and the Way of the Black Wheel.                 jcowan@reutershealth.com
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan