Re: Tense naming question

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 05:41:31PM +0000, Joe wrote:
> Matt Trinsic wrote:
>
> >Greetings all,
> >I have recently modified the language I am currently working on to
> >include two different past tenses. One is for actions that started in
> >the past, but are still happening. The other for actions that started in
> >the past are are no longer happening. Is there a name for these
> >different tenses, and if not, does anyone have any good suggestions
> >and/or interesting examples of naturals languages that have the same
> >distinction?
>
>
> Well, something that was started in the past and is still happening is a
> present.  Something that's no longer happening is a past.
That's one approach, sure, but some languages give you finer granularity
than that.  For instance, English uses the present perfect progressive
(something of an oxymoronical name) for actions which began in the past
but are still underway: "I have been reviewing these papers . . .".
That's not much use, though; the English name is syntactic (describing
the way the tense is formed) rather than semantic (describing its purpose),
so it's not much use unless your language happens to form the tense the
same way.

The distinction being made is called "aspect", and is technically
orthogonal to tense, although many languages conflate the concepts in
their grammar terminology.  In general, most languages distinguish
aspect not with respect to the present, but with respect to the time
under discussion.  Thus, at the point in time under discussion in the
past, was the action still underway or had it already occurred and
stopped?  That answer determines whether you use the imperfect or
perfect tense in Latin, for example.

Some langauges have only aspect and not tense; Klingon is an example:

        jIta'           I do  OR I did OR I will do
        jIta'taH        I am doing OR I was doing OR I will be doing
        jIta'pu'        I have done OR  I had done OR I will have done

As I said, many languages conflate aspect with tense.  Klingon has no
tense, but still conflates aspect with other attributes of the action.
If the completed action was the accomplishment of an intentional goal,
-pu' may be replaced with -ta'.  If the ongoing action is heading toward
a goal (an end is in sight; it's not just endless repetition), then -taH
may be replaced with -lI'.  This last sense is called the "progressive",
because it indicates that some sort of progress is being made - a
logical implication which is lacking in the English use of the term
"progressive".

Let's think about terminology for your lang.  If the set of tenses
looks something like this, then these names may work:

START   END             NAME
past    past            perfect
past    present         preterit
past    future          imperfect
present present         present
present future          progressive
future  future          future

You may want to have finer granularity, such as distinguishing future
actions considered instantaneously (future/same-future) from future
actions considered as having duration (future/further-in-the-future);
the latter could be the "future progressive", in which case you might want
to rename the "imperfect" to "past progressive".

-Mark

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