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Re: Anti-telic?

From:Sai Emrys <sai@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 9:12
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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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>