Sally Caves wrote:
>
> On Sun, 15 Nov 1998, Gerald Koenig wrote:
> > If I diagram it in Vector Time Tense it comes out as a
> > perfective if the time of stopping is known or definite (constant, ke
> > or j); and as an imperfect if the time of stopping is unknown
> > (variable, zu) and was allowed to slide along the timeline to finish
> > at an unknown moment.
> In ENGLISH, at any rate, these
> two constructions mean entirely different things and would require
> differentiation as well, perhaps, in a conlang.
I am looking at prepositions and finding that they
are "aspected" similarly to verbs. An example given
in the General Upper Model (sounds ominous) is:
>>> There have been many problems since the war
>>> There were many problems after the war
>>> ? There were many problems since the war
>>> ? There have been many problems after the war
>>>
>>> The since temporal relationship focuses on the entire interval including the
>>> beginning point, it therefore favors the present-in-past tense (``have
>>> been'') to express the explicit extension in time of the holding of the
>>> process/state; the after temporal relationship does not necessarily extend
>>> to the extreme of the interval, simply expressing that some process/state
>>> holds at some point within the interval identified.
I don't quite understand this yet, but suspect
that tense and aspect are lurking everywhere.