Re: THEORY: Tenses (was: Re: THEORY: ... Auxiliaries...)

On Tuesday, July 12, 2005, at 12:17 , Doug Dee wrote:

> In a message dated 7/10/2005 5:08:38 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> salut_vous_autre@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
>
>> But except latin and romance languages, are there languages that really
>> have
>> a grammatical futur?
>
> Yes, lots:  Greek, at least some of the Celtic languages,
Well, yes and no. It depends what Max's question actually means. After all,
  "I will have" is _grammatical_. It is also analytical and is formed using
a modal auxiliary. I guess all languages have grammatical ways of
expressing future time if need be.

By homing in on Latin does Max mean 'having synthetically formed tenses'?
If so, then Ancient Greek fits, but modern Greek does not. It uses the
invariable auxiliary particle /Ta/ followed by either the 'present' or
'aorist' subjunctive, depending upon whether we want imperfective or
perfective aspect.

In Latin itself, which is the first language Max mentions, the future
tenses were both time-aspect combos. The Latin verb formed all its various
bits and pieces from three stems or bases: the infectum, the perfectum and
the supinum. The last was used only for forming the perfect & future
paticiples as well as, of course, the supine itself and for forming
various deverbal nouns & adjectives.

Latin combined, in theory, the infectum & perfectum, with three time
references to give the familiar six tenses of the textbooks:
                    INFECTUM                PERFECTUM
NEUTRAL    present tense: scribo           perfect tense: sripsisse

PAST       imperfect tense: sribebam       pluperfect tense: scripseram

FUTURE     future tense: scribam           future perfect tense: scripsero

Now it would be nice if we had neat imperfective ~ perfective aspect
contrast in the three time frames, as we find in the Slav languages, for
example. But it is not so neat. The Latin perfect tense did duty both for
'present perfect' (not perfective!) and for the 'past perfective' (the
pluperfect was 'past perfect'). Also the Latin 'present tense' was often
used for 'narrative past' - that is why I used the term 'neutral' rather
than 'present' above.

Any way, back to the future  :)

It will be seen from the above that the Latin 'future tenses' combine both
time & aspect. Max & I had a longish exchange about whether the 'future
tense' in the Romance languages was purely temporal, or whether it
combined time & aspect.

Certainly the synthetic future of Ancient Greek was part of its
_aspectual_ system, as I have shown several times in past mails; and the
futures of modern Greek are certainly time-aspect combos.

I won't pursue the Celtic languages with their several different futures -
progressive, habitual, perfect etc
     ;)

> many Australian
> languages, and others.
I guess in fact that the majority of languages with tense systems (in the
conventional sense of the word) have grammatical future tenses.
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On Tuesday, July 12, 2005, at 02:40 , caeruleancentaur wrote:
[snip]
> Swahili forms the future tense by infixing -ta- between the personal
> pronoun prefix and the verb:
>
> nitasoma - I shall read
> utasema - you shall say
> atapenda - he/she shall love
> etc.
Yep - but the in relative form of the future the infix is -taka- as in
_atakayependa_ (a-taka-ye-penda) "he who will love" - thus betraying its
origin from 'taka' "to want". It is not uncommon for languages to use a
verb meaning 'want' or 'will' to form expressions to denote future time
(cf. English!). Chinese which has no formal tense system sometimes uses
yao4 (want) with little more meaning than a future auxiliary.

I do not know Swahili well enough to know wether its future is purely
temporal with no overtones of aspect and/or mood, or not. Another Bantu
language, Xhosa, has several future tenses:
         near future:  ndiza hukamba = I will/shall go (now, soon)
  future (full form):  ndiya kuhamba = I will/shall go
future (short form):  ndo.hamba     = I'll go
   future continuous:  ndiya kuba ndihamba = I will/shall be going

It is quite clear that we are dealing with both aspect & time here.

It seems to me that in the majority of languages conventional tenses
combine both time & aspect and sometimes mood (apart from, of course,
indicative). I know that at one extreme, so to speak, we have Chinese
which has no formal tense system, but does have suffixes to denote aspect.
  The Semitic languages were also like this - but I think some have
developed some simple tense systems.

Are there any natlangs at the opposite end of spectrum, i.e. that formally
mark only time reference with no formal way of denoting aspect? (That is a
genuine question   :)

Ray
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