Word Order Indicating Tense (was: my grammar)

> 3: there are 3 times, represented by the word order
> (I can't see a linguistic possibility and waste it by giving a stric or a
> free word-order)
>
> VSO is the past
> SVO is the present
> SOV is the futur
>
Tense is differentiated only by word order? Is there any case marking on
the arguments? If not then this could be completely confusing,
especially if you allow the dropping of arguments, or there are verbs
which can be either transitive or intransitive. For instance, "cook" and
"see" in English can be transitive or intransitive. Imagine english
worked like this. Then:

he see the man cook chicken

Is this:

he sees the man, the chicken cooked

or:

he sees, the man cooks the chicken

This isn't a very good example, but still.... also, for intransitive
verbs the difference between the present and future in neutralized. If
on the other hand you are marking case, then at least one of the
arguments much have something in addition, either an adposition or a
case marker with it, and if this is so why not merely add something to
the verb to directly mark tense and then fix the word order? I'm not
saying this idea is completely unworkable, but it seems to me that
having word order mark both grammatical role and tense is overloading
things a little. If the role of the NP is marked in some other way then
it's not too bad but still possibly confusing.
 Of course, there are Monster Raving Loony langs which don't provide any
helpful distinguishing of S and O at all, and there are many langs which
don't grammaticize tense, so I guess the system is possible. But I'd
expect there to be relatively frequent insertions of temporal adverbs
especially to clarify what the intended meaning was in your system.

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