Re: THEORY: Temporal Auxiliaries, Aspectual Auxiliaries, Modal Auxiliaries

Hello, Max.  Thanks for writing.

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, # 1 <salut_vous_autre@H...> wrote:
> Tom Chappell wrote:
>
> >[QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WHOLE POST IN GENERAL]
> >10) Are there NatLangs with Auxiliaries that are Temporal and
Aspectual and
> >Modal?
> >
>
> In French:
>
> J'aurais mangé = I'd have eaten
>
> The auxiliary "avoir" caries Past Tense, Perfective Aspect, and
Conditionnal
> Mode
>
>
> But this is the only only one I can think of since the other French
examples
> I know carry only 2 of them with the third represented by a zero
marking,
> like "J'aurai mangé" = "I'll have eaten" that carries future tense
and
> perfect aspect and in which the indicative mood is implied but not
marked
>
>
> - Max
Thanks for the example.

(It occurred to me after my original post that the participle used in
French's passe' compose' might be not an active participle but a past
participle.  English's participles are best distinguished as passive
vs. active, but I don't know that that's true for French.)

The situations in which one tense, or one aspect, or one mood,
is "marked by zero", or "unmarked", makes questions such as this one
yet more interesting, and answering them yet more complicated; or at
least I think so.

You are right, I would not be entirely satisfied by an example in
which one of the "markers" "carried" on the auxiliary turned out to
be a "zero"-marker.

Similar questions arise when one voice, one person, one number, or
one gender, is marked by "zero".

Is there, cross-linguistically, a universal (perhaps statistical,
and/or perhaps implicational) about which tense, aspect, mood, voice,
person, number, and/or gender, is going to be marked by "0", if any
is?

(I know that Greenberg said, if any case was marked by "0", it would
be the case that included subjects of intransitives.)

-----

Tom H.C. in MI