>
Bruce,
I was intrigued with the two examples in your last paragraph:
(1) "John must have been swimming for two hours."
(2) "John must be swimming for two hours."
In (1) the speaker is simply referring to the length of time John has been
swimming (or swam) and the utterance obviously takes place two hours or more
after the commencement of that swimming.
In (2) the speaker is bringing to the hearer's attention the length of time
John has chosen to swim on that day (i.e. John is understood to be able to
vary the length of time he swims, one assumes by hour units, and sometimes
swims longer or shorter than that time). The utterance can be made at some
point within the second hour.
It is extraordinary that this semantic subtlety is affected by the presence
or absence of the auxiliaries 'have been' for it changes the meaning of the
adverbial phrase 'for two hours' -- in (1) meaning a simple length of time
applied to the action, in (2) meaning a specifically chosen length for that
action.
Edmond
Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England
Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33
Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256
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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>>
>
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>
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