Re: Anti-telic?

R A Brown, On 11/07/2006 19:59:
> Eldin Raigmore wrote:
>> On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:58:51 +0100, And Rosta <and.rosta@...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> 'Anti-telic' sounds very much like 'eternal',
>
> It does, doesn't it? Which was the point I was asking about. Tho my
> _question_ was strangely interpreted as my foisting my belief system
> onto a grammar. Bizarre.
>
>>> which could obviously be used for 'platonic' statements like "2+2=4"
>>> or "a square has four sides",
>
> Tho strictly that assumes a Platonic view of reality_   :)
>
>>> 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?
>
> Good question! "I was born in 1967" arguably remains true while the
> earth lasts. In a sense, I guess, it would remain true even if the sun
> becomes a red giant and swallows up the earth.
>
>> "Gnomic" applies to general background knowledge that the speaker knows,
>
> Gnomic:
> "Denoting an aspectual form expressing a general or universal truth."
> [Trask]
>
> But telic and atelic is about _goals_, that's what the words mean (Gr.
> telos = goal). I assumed that by introducing a third term 'anti-telic'
> Sai was suggesting an action/event/circumstance that could specifically
> have no goal that would ever bring it to a conclusion. But what has "
> expressing a general or universal truth" got to do with the presence or
> absence of a goal?
>
> I'm confused.
>
> We have aspectual labels 'telic', 'atelic' & we have 'gnomic'. So what
> is exactly is 'anti-telic'? (NB - a genuine question!)
It's a good question. Telicity has to do with having intrinsic boundaries
(& is akin to countability in nouns).

telic = having intrinsic boundaries
atelic [standard sense] = lacking intrinsic boundaries

But one could draw the following trichotomy:

telic = having intrinsic boundaries
'atelic' = having extrinsic boundaries
'antitelic = lacking boundaries of any sort (which entails, I think, 'eternal')

>>> 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).
>
> The last example is surely the narrative use of the present, as tho the
> action is happening before the listener's eyes, so to speak. It's
> ancient and found in many (all?) cultures. It does not seem to me
> relevant to this argument, especially as 'killing' must be telic  :)
Change the example to "Achilles is the slayer of Hector" (i.e. keeping the intended
utterance meaning unchanged, but removing the distracting sentence meaning that
gives rise to Ray's interpretation). In our world, in which Achilles and Hector
are figures of legend, the state of affairs "A is slayer of H" does not seem to
have temporal boundaries.

>>> (1) Even in a worldview in which time is bounded, 'eternal' could be
>>> defined as 'coextensive with all time'.
>>
>> Good point.
>
> It could be, but that is not the way it is understood in some
> philosophic and religious systems. But 'anti-telic', as I understand it,
> would only be appropriate if "all time" is limitless, i.e. goes on for
> ever, and ever, and ever .........
>
> But even if 'eternal' is so defined as 'coextensive with all time', then
> we would still need another term to define the notion of 'not bound by
> space or time' even if one thought that such a notion was nonsense. If
> the second meaning is "not allowed" then some one is foisting their view
> point onto the semantics of a language.
By my lights, 'not bound by space or time' is better than 'coextensive with all
time' as a definition of 'eternal' (and as a characterization of the various
examples I gave).

>>> (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.
>
> But what is meant by 'eternal'? If we mean 'gnomic' then it would seem
> that a few natlangs (and probably conlangs) do have such forms, but it
> is not common.
>
>> 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.
>
> Quite so.
>
>> Do most peoples frequently speak of the eternal?  Have most peoples
>> frequently spoken of the eternal?
>
> No.
I think the answer is surely Yes, since the sorts of examples I gave are
commonplace in quotidian discourse. That doesn't mean there's a functional
pressure for a special tense/aspect/aktionsart for eternals, though, since any
tense/aspect will do to express eternals so long as it doesn't involve
perfectivity and doesn't involve a tense that excludes eternality. (This last
point presupposes some sort of functional equivalence between "all time" and
"outside time".)

--And.

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