--- Garth Wallace <gwalla@...> wrote:
> Gary Shannon wrote:
> >
> > Which of these are the same tenses and which are
> > different ways of expressing the same tense, and
> what
> > tenses are they anyway?
<snip>
Thanks to everyone for their input on this. It goes
back to a question I posted several months ago about
the minimal set of tenses/moods/voices a language must
have to be able to express reasonable thoughts without
excessive circumlocution.
I'm still trying to arrive at a set that will be
small, but versatile. Obviously it's important to
distinguish between "I am bad" and "I am being bad"
but this can be done without tense as in "I am
perpetually bad" vs "I am temporarily bad"
But some of them are trickier. For example, how does
one use only simple past and some circumlocution to
distinguish between "I ran" and "I was running"? "I
ran momentarily" vs "I ran continuously"? or something
like that?
--gary
<http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsTense.htm>
> and mood
>
<http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsMoodAndModality.htm>