Re: Noun tense

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 14:14:12 -0500, Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>
wrote:

>On Monday 22 July 2002 10:46, julien eychenne wrote:
>> le lun 22-07-2002 à 16:55, Peter Clark a écrit :
>> >         English contractions are showing the possibility of developing
>> > into a noun-tense system, just as soon as we stop analysing them as
>> > noun+auxiliary. Consider:
>>
>> Well, I don't get it. I am wondering how we could consider pronoun +
>> auxiliary as tensed nouns, even  if I try hard. Tensed nouns are
>> supposed to bear in themselves a tense value, such as nawatl |in
>> tlânamaka-k| is 'the one who sold' > "the seller". But pronouns in that
>> case don't bear this value intrinsecally (we don't have |I'll| =
>> *"future me" or something like that) but it just supports the value of
>> the tensed verb. So it seems that these are two different things.
>
>        You are correct...at this point in English's development. What my
> point was that it is entirely possible that future generations will
> analyze (pro-)noun + auxiliary contraction as a single unit.
>        For example, take the natural process of languages, which
> generally moves isolating -> agglutinating -> fusional -> isolating.
[snip]

No argument there, but I think julien was referring to the semantics. The
English examples mark the tense of the noun's matrix, not that of the noun
itself. Something like
(John-PAST write letter) could be
"John wrote a letter" using the English-style interpretation, and
"The person who was John writes a letter" using the other.

Jeff J.

>        What happened in the case of Enamyn was that the auxiliary became
> a morpheme of the stem of the main subject. The various markers for
> direct and indirect objects were re-analyzed as temporally relational
> markers; as time went on, these relational markers gained additional
> semantic meaning to indicate that they refered to either the future, the
> present, or the past of the subject. Hence, in the sentence "She-past
> write poem-r.pres to.honor grandfather-r.past" has three nouns: "She,"
> which is in the past, "poem," which is concurrent in the past with "she"
> (relative-present), and "grandfather," which is in the past of the past
> "she" (relative-past). The literal sense of the sentence is, "She wrote a
> poem to honor her dead grandfather."
>        :Peter

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