Re: Anti-telic?

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. Don't foist it onto the grammar.
:-) (Let alone given that we may be dealing with a conworld... I'm
thinking, e.g. Wheel of Time series.)

And even 'big crunch' ways, AFAIK it's just that we have no way to
know what'd happen afterwards (ditto pre-'big bang'). Might be
cyclical on a grand scale.

But y'know, most people probably aren't comparing their tenses (even
cyclical ones) to quite that vast of a timescale. ;-)

> When we come to concepts of the eternity of God, of the soul etc, we
> are, as I understand it, dealing with the concept of *timelessness*, in
> which case the telic/atelic business is irrelevant.
That's another interesting tense... though it'd be inaplicable to
telic (possibly even atelic) verbs obviously.

> > Any natlang or conlang examples of this?
>
> Indeed. I cannot see that it is possible.
Surely you can see it grammatically? Or in WoT world?

E.g. [roughly] "the universe exists" is probably anti-telic...

But anyway, you could lie or exaggerate into antitelicity too. :-)

> > (This relates to another thing mentioned by John Q quoting me at the
> > talk, about having a verb tense that denotes some sort of cyclical
> > tense - e.g. it happened in the past and will happen in the future,
> > but isn't happening right now.)
>
> Sort of like Vesuvius erupting or Yellowstone Park blowing itself apart?
> Interesting idea - but altho natlangs show interesting variety in the
> way they organize tenses, I don't know any examples of a "once did &
> will do again" tense.
Again see WoT for inspiration.

 - Sai

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