Re: TYPOLOGY: (conlangs and natlangs): "Tense-Prominent" vs "Aspect-Prominent"

---In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>Hi!
Hi.  Thanks for writing.

>Eldin Raigmore writes:
[snip]
>Fukhian has neither grammatical tense nor aspect marking. So 4c. (It
>does have marking for 'Vorzeitigkeit', but I don't know what that is
>in English.)
"Fore-time-y-hood"?  ;-)
"Anteriority". (This one is serious.)
English is said to distinguish this by opposing the Past Perfect (a.k.a.
Pluperfect) to the Present Perfect and/or "Simple Past".

See, e.g.,
http://englischlehrer.de/language/grammar_participle.php

>It lacks aspect marking for the reason Herman Miller
>mentioned: I did not know it existed. It lacks tense marking because
>I learned that tense was not mandatory in some languages, and I
>probably included it in order to collect interesting features.
I think vorzetigkeit is a kind of tense, at least in Bernard Comrie's
Cambridge Textbook in Linguistics "Tense"; it qualifies, IMO, as what he
would have called "Relative Past" -- that is, the so-marked verb happened
before some other verb; no commitment is made one way or the other about
whether or not it happened before the speech-act.  If the "other verb"
happens during or happened before the speech-act, then the "anterior"-
marked verb must also have happened before the speech-act; but if
the "other verb" will happen after the speech-act, more information would
necessary to figure it out.

So this would apply to past-in-the-past, "past-in-the-present"(= just plain
past), and past-in-the-future; depending on when the "other verb"
happened/happens/will happen.

So Fukhian might be 4a rather than 4c.  If the marking for anteriority is
mandatory, it might even be 1.  (Or maybe not.)

>Tyl Sjok is pro-drop, ambiguous, and underspecified. It is 4c.
I am interested in the "ambibuous" part and the "underspecified" part.
Which one is -- or are they both -- most related to the "4c" answer you
give for Tyl Sjok?

>Qþyn|gài has morphemes for tense and aspect, but they are not
>mandatory either.  Again, it is 4c.  One of the mandatory categories
>is evidentiality/mood.
>
>And theoretically, S11 is like Qþyn|gài, but has no words or
>morphemes yet.
Does that make it very _easy_ to learn, or very _difficult_ to learn?

>So I seem to clearly prefer 4c for my artlangs. :-)
>
>Finally, Da Mätz se Basa and Þrjótrunn are both a posteriori langs
>(Germanic and Romance, resp.).
So, probably, 3a?

>**Henrik
Thanks.

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