Re: Voice, Mood, Tense, a minimalist perspective
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, December 30, 2003, 3:37 |
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On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 08:53:21 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
>But if one were to strike a happy medium between the
>sublime and the ridiculous, which moods, voices and
>tenses would you consider to be the minimum set for a
>reasonably mature language of daily commerce? (As
>opposed to a language of great literary strength or
>one of great scientific or legal precision. In
>otherwords, the street language of the common people.)
>
>Who votes for which tenses?
I think the most you'd need would be a past / non-past distinction, as long
as the language has some distinctions of aspect (at least perfective vs.
imperfective). Chinese gets by without any grammatical indication of tense
at all. Moods could be mostly worked around, but a basic realis / irrealis
distinction would be useful; you'll also need imperatives. You can almost
get by without voice distinctions if your nouns are marked for case,
although reflexives would be useful to have. But if your language has
participles, it'd be nice to have an active / passive distinction.
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