Peter,
I have an issue with English grammar as it is normally taught. We seem to
have a double standard. We think nothing of teaching that common nouns have
a plural in -s and that this means "more than one." But then we teach about
the exceptions where the plural has a different form or that the plural has
a meaning of "one" as in "news" to refer to information. Then there is the
difference in meaning between "pennies" and "pence" or between "peas" and
"pease." Some of these are not the best examples, but my point here is that
the difference between singular and plural is on two dimensions:
morphological and semantic, and the two are not always in parallel. The
Chinese trying to learn English can probably give better examples (contrast:
"wheat" vs. "oats").
This may seem a bit removed from your query about "tense." Many people have
the mistaken notion that the form-meaning parallel that is broken for noun
plurals ought for some reason be taken as still valid for tense on verbs.
The forms of the verb "to be" are interesting in this regard. The present
tense "am", "is" and "are" are systematically derived from the old present
tense. But so are the forms "was", "were." These were also present tense
forms. In this case the verb has none of its own, they are suppletive. But
they are used to refer to past time and have become past forms. This is the
same thing that happened to the forms of the modals. The past tense forms,
once used in situations that were referring to past time came to be used for
present time. As Herb mentioned there are two main uses of the modals. The
first is to modify the truth usually claimed by the speaker of an assertion
(subjective). The second is to modify the objective reality of the
proposition contained within the assertion. The past form has come to do
this modification to a degree less than the present form. It may be of some
interest that the modals "ought" and "must" (deontic) have lost their
present forms.
In my practice I feel best speaking of *tense* to refer to the morphological
form and *time* or *temporality* to refer to the semantic impact of using
the particular form. The implication is that the other auxiliaries are
treated similarly. This means that for me there is no such thing as a
"tense" called "present perfect" or "past perfect" in English. "Has" and
"have" are present forms and "had" is the past tense form. What we have
here is a perfect "aspect." This makes their importance for referring to
time relative to the past or the present time. (The British use of the past
perfect form as a past tense, if it indeed is, is incomprehensible to me.
Maybe they have been influenced by French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) The
aspect easiest to keep straight is the progressive which is used with the
present ("am," "is," and "are") and past forms ("was" and "were").
The periphrastic stringing of aspects together can give the impression of
additional forms, but (unlike the stringing of forms in the Latin paradigm)
their interpretation as aspect is predictable: "John has been swimming for
two hours." The use of modals with these other auxiliaries has got to be
subjective: "John must have been swimming for two hours." This "present"
perfect serves to refer to a past activity. The modal with the "present"
progressive "John must be swimming for two hours" is still subjective, where
the speaker is justifying his statement, and it refers to an activity in the
present which is also not marked by a tense.
Bruce
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Adams" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 8:48 PM
Subject: modals and tense
> I've only been following this list for about a year, and I'll be you have
> thrashed this topic around more than once in the past. But I wasn't here
> for those thrashings, so I'm inviting another round.
>
> How do you analyze tense and modals? Is "might" the past tense of "may"?
> Is "could" the past tense of "can"? Or is it more accurate to say that
> modals don't inflect for tense? There are ten (?) modals (will, would,
> shall, should, can, could, may, might, must, and ought to, and none of
> them is past tense.
>
> Peter Adams
>
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