Craig,

Just a quick note on "taste," followed by a longer bit on tense, aspect,
and sequence of tenses.  I wouldn't want to make taste a primary
criterion for grammatical choices; there are obviously too many other
factors involved.  But the fact is that many decisions we make about
word choice, grammatical choices, morphological choices do reflect
taste, or at least a preference for one register over another.  We find
colleagues like DD and Scott preferring a more rigorously coded formal
written English and others working more willingly with fairly wide
degrees of informality, with the goal of helping students learn to make
choices that will allow them to be either more or less formal as the
situations demands.  Taste comes into it, and for many people it's a
primary consideration.  I suspect the results for one's writing, whether
one is taste-driven or register driven (not really a dichotomy), aren't
all that different.  For the writing teacher with no training in
grammar, I'm not sure how anything other than taste can drive judgment.

Now on to tense and related matters.  Brad's example, "George Bush had
been president", is a nice lead-in.  Brad judges the utterance not a
sentence because he can't assign meaning to it.  Aside from whether
that's a legitimate criterion for sentencehood, he's right that without
a context we can't completely interpret the sentence; we don't know what
time in what discourse it's related to.  In the paper you mentioned, I
deal with tense and aspect as separate but intersecting categories.  In
fact the relationship is more complex than that in English as in most
languages.  Tense and aspect interact and overlap in ways that make
simple dichotomies difficult to follow very far.  For a brief
introduction to the topic, as I did in that paper, the distinction works
well and is pedagogically useful.  For a thorough treatment of English
tense and the auxiliary, even without modals, the dichotomy breaks down.

Huddleston&Pullum limit aspect to the progressive.  They treat the
perfects as secondary tenses.  Their primary tenses are present and
preterite (past), marked inflectionally, and their secondary tenses are
perfect and non-perfect, the former marked periphrastically.  (They do
comment in a footnote that perfect is frequently treated as an aspect
but don't say anything further about that.)  The distinction between
primary and secondary tenses is that primary tenses are deictic and
secondary are not.  A deictic tense refers to a particular time, usually
the time of orientation of the discourse.  In The Scarlet Letter, for
example, the present tenses refer to a time in the 1670s or so.  In
Orwell's 1984, his presents referred to a time in the future when he
wrote, but in the past now.  So perfects, as secondary, non-deictic
tenses, get their time reference from the time reference of the verb
with deictic tense that they are in construction with.  This is why Brad
finds his sample sentence uncomfortable.  The context (none) contains no
deictic tense to define the time of the perfect relative to, and the
reader does not find that satisfying.  Of course such a situation nearly
never occurs in actual language use because a perfect doesn't get used
without a context that allows time assignment, that is, that contains a
verb with deictic tense.  The distinction between primary (deictic) and
secondary (non-deictic) tenses turns out to be quite a useful one.

Beyond this, there are quite a few different meanings associated with
perfects.   "I've just eaten" reflects accomplishment.  "I've waited for
you for four hours" reflects immediate past time.  "She may have been
here" simply marks past, since modals don't have tense marking.
Examples like these illustrate how perfect bleeds over from tense into
aspect.  

Obviously I wouldn't try to present this sort of analysis to an
undergraduate grammar class and certainly not to a writing class.  It's
grad seminar stuff, but it's useful if we are going to talk in explicit
ways about how time and aspect are represented in English grammar.

I do recommend the Huddleston&Pullum chapter on the verb.  Their
discussion of tense, aspect, and modality is one of the most carefully
worked out that I've found.  It's a demanding read, but very much worth
the effort.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: 2008-02-17 16:18
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Context matters - continued

Herb,
   DD follows the "sounds right" with a question about why. ("Sequence
of
tense sort of stuff?")
   I have a hard time with the implication that perfect aspect does no
work.
   Gorge Bush is President for seven years.
   George Bush was President for seven years.
   George Bush has been President for seven years.
For the most part, the third one sounds right to me (in the context of
our
current situation) because it conveys the sense of a continuing reality.
It sounds right because there's a form/meaning match. We can do that a
number of ways (He is in the final year of a second four year term),but
"taste">leaves me uncomfortable.
   I don't think you are in that camp, but most people believe grammar
is
about what's correct or what's tasteful, and that's one reason it's out
of favor.
   What does perfect aspect do? Don't we need to define that in
functional
terms?

Craig

 DD shows us that there is also a matter of taste involve in these
choices.
>  And his taste is better than mine.
>
> Herb
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of DD
Farms
> Sent: Sun 2/17/2008 2:04 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Context matters - continued
>
> At 08:01 AM 2/17/2008, Brad Johnston wrote:
>>In context, do the five 'had's belong in or out?
>>  "Beyond containment, the major thrust of American Cold War
>> diplomatic foreign policy was to return the defeated enemies,
>> Germany and Japan, to the emerging international system as
>> full-fledged members. This task, unprecedented in respect to
>> nations on which unconditional surrender (had been) was imposed
>> less than five years earlier, made sense to a generation of
>> American leaders whose formative experience (had been) was
>> overcoming the Great Depression of the 1930s. The generation that
>> organized resistance to the Soviet Union (had) experienced Franklin
>> D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which (had) restored political stability
>> by closing the gap between American expectations and economic
>> reality. The same generation (had) prevailed in World War II,
>> fought in the name of democracy."
>
> DD: Sounds better with all the "hads." Sequence of tense sort of
stuff?
>
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