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

On Saturday, July 9, 2005, at 07:44 , JS Bangs wrote:

>> Does Comrie, or anyone, know what the maximum number of tenses in any
>> natlang is?
>>
>> Does anyone have a complete list of all tenses that have been
>> attested in natlangs?
>> [snip]
>
> This is a difficult question to answer. The problem is that in
> natlangs, tense is often mixed up with aspect and mood,
I would say that it nearly always is.

> making it
> difficult to enumerate the tenses in any given language. By one count,
> English has twelve "tenses":
When I was at school we learnt 16 tenses    :)

> But of course, we traditionally only talk about three "tenses" in
> English, past, present, and future,
That's because of Latin   :)

> and a good argument can be made
> that morphologically there are really only two tenses (past and
> present).
More accurately, past & non-past. Future time is always denoted by
so-called 'present tenses' after the conjunctions 'if' and 'when' in
English, and are often denoted the same way as main verbs; for example:
I am staying in Paris next week.
He is coming here to morrow.
She is writing home as soon as she gets here.
etc.

In the strict sense of 'the grammatical which correlates most distinctly
with distinctions of time' English has only two - all the rest is conveyed
by combining tense with aspect and/or mood. In the sense used in
traditional grammars, which combine aspect and, often, mood, then English
has a dozen or more, depending upon how you count them   :)

Traditionally, Latin is said to have six indicative tenses; in the strict
meaning of 'time distinction' it has only three.

> So I don't really think this question is answerable.
Certainly not with defining 'tense'. In its traditional use, the question
is probably unanswerable. But i think in view of the recent thread on
auxiliaries etc, Tom is using 'tense' in the strict meaning of 'the
grammatical which correlates most distinctly with distinctions of time'.

> However, I would conjecture that no language expresses more than five
> tense-like categories via a single morpho-syntactic mechanism, and
> that maximally these are present, near past, distant past, near
> future, and distant future.
That is my feeling also. according to Trask, William Foley ("The Papuan
Languages of New Guinea", Cambridge University Press, 1986) identifies 7
tenses in the New Guinea language 'Yimas': four denoting varying degrees
of remoteness in the past, a present, a near future & a distant future. If
indeed these are all strictly tense distinctions without aspect, then I
suspect this is about the practical limit.

> Your "hesteral past", etc., are variants
> of this basic system. Counterexamples?
"hesteral" - Ach! What sort of word is that?

[snip]
>> Some languages (which ones?) have "anterior" and "posterior" pasts
>> and futures.
>
> Well, English: "I will have gone", "I had done X before Y".
These both combine aspect, mood and tense.
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On Saturday, July 9, 2005, at 07:04 , tomhchappell wrote:

> Hello, Doug, Max, and other contributors, and thanks for writing.
>
> Does Comrie, or anyone, know what the maximum number of tenses in any
> natlang is?
Depends on the meaning of tense. But in its strict linguistic meaning,
AFAIK the maximum attested is seven - see above.

> Does anyone have a complete list of all tenses that have been
> attested in natlangs?
I do not know what names Foley gave those tenses.

> Aside from the "hesteral past" (yesterday) and "crastinal future"
> (tomorrow), "hodial past" (earlier today) and "hodial future"
> (earlier tomorrow), are there any other specific time periods that
'crastinal' I can go along with (<-- Latin: _crastinus_ "of or pertaining
to tomoorow") - but 'hesteral' and 'hodial' - ach-y-fi!

Real Latin adjectives:
hodiernus = of or pertaining to today
hesternus = of or pertaining to yesterday
crastinus = of or pertaining to tomorrow.

Latin had no nouns for 'today', 'yeaterday' and 'tommorow' - it had to say
things like 'dies crastinus', 'dies hesternus' etc.

Of course there were the adverbs: cras, heri, hodie.

But if you are going to form *hodial from 'hodie', then surely the others
are *herial and *crasal. Ghastly!

Both _hodiernal_ and _hesternal_ both already exist in English and can be
found in any reputable dictionary. They are also 'well-formed'   :)

Ray
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