Re: Anti-telic?

On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:58:51 +0100, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:

>'Anti-telic' sounds very much like 'eternal', which could obviously be
>used for 'platonic' statements like "2+2=4" or "a square has four sides",
>but could conceivably be used for things like "I am/was born in 1967"
>or "I am father of Edwin", both of which statements arguably will be true
>forever and slighly more arguably have been true forever.
How are those remarks related to the term "gnomic" and its meaning?

"Gnomic" applies to general background knowledge that the speaker knows,
and thinks many people know, and thinks the addressee _should_ know -- at
least from the moment of speaking onward.  So the gnomic clause, in the
speaker's opinion, has been true for a long time (if not necessarily
forever) and will remain true for a long time (if not necessarily forever) -
- probably for the speaker's and addressee's entire lifetimes.

>Or, more
>poetrically, "X and Y are soulmates". Or statements about other
>worlds: "Sherlock Holmes is a detective". Or even "Achilles kills Hector"
>(with tense in our world, not the Iliad's).
>
>I'm sure(ish) I've read somewhere of an 'eternal' tense/aspect in some
>natlang, but Comrie's _Tense_ and _Aspect_ do not list 'eternal' in the
>index.
"Aorist" comes from words meaning "without boundary" or "without horizon".
Usually we see "aoristIC" used to mean "perfectIVE"; but aren't gnomic
clauses often aorist or aoristic? The Wikipedia article lists three "gnomic
tenses"; "gnomic present", "gnomic future", and "gnomic aorist".  (Which
means they think "aorist" is a "tense", whereas "aoristIC" is an "aspect".)

>>Sai Emrys wrote:
>>>On 7/11/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>>>>But can _anything_ continue indefinitely in a temporal universe?
>>>Hey mon, that's your belief system.
>
>(1) Even in a worldview in which time is bounded, 'eternal' could be
>defined as 'coextensive with all time'.
Good point.

>(2) We can easily conceive of the eternal, so there is no reason why a
>human language (whether con or nat) cannot have a tense/aspect for it.
If they don't often speak of it, they are unlikely to _grammaticalize_ it;
there is unlikely to be _morphology_ for it unless either they speak of it
often, or the morphology for it is an "accidental side effect" (so to
speak) of combining morphologies for other tenses and/or aspects of which
they _do_ often speak.

Do most peoples frequently speak of the eternal?  Have most peoples
frequently spoken of the eternal?

>--And.
------
Thanks,
eldin

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