Re: Noun tense

Quoting Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:

> > On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 05:14, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > > In general, I would disagree with the proposition that these
> > > cliticized verb forms are evidence that English are likely
> > > someday to mark tense on nouns.  Evidence that they're still
> > > clitics comes from grammatical constructions like the following:
> > >
> > > "The Man raving wildly's been rather active lately."
>
> This may be grammatical for you, but to me it looks like a "mistake" for
> either
It's definitely grammatical for me, although I will grant that it
may be somewhat awkward prose-style.

> I asked a friend offlist what was wrong with the sentence and he said:
>
>     << you can't use 's to represent the word has, man
>        should not be capitalized, and it sure seems to
>        need a "who" or "that" and a "was" or "is" in there >>
>
> (I dont quite agree...)
Well, yes, <Man> should be <man>.  That was a typo, but in general
it's not a good idea to ask others "what's wrong with this", since
they'll look for something wrong on the assumption that they are not
experts and so can assume that something *is* in fact wrong.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers