Brock,
In the process of trying to learn more about English grammar, I, like
you, have gravitated towards trying to discern more about how language
works and why.  Learning about the rules of English grammar do not, in
themselves, satisfy my wish to understanding why the rules are as they
are.  There seems to be a larger, superimposed, organic structure or
system of meaning--which your wonderings speak to directly.   I really
have had such a tough time trying to learn grammar from the ground up,
that is, from a rule-oriented perspective!  What is more to the point, I
believe, is to try to understanding the nature of the relationship
between words, and between words and thought, and then again between
words and physical reality--the dynamic between these things, that is.
I believe your comments, which I find so imaginative, are along the same
track of thinking.


>>> "Haussamen, Brock" <[log in to unmask]> 05/18/01 10:23AM >>>
An aspect of verb and tense that interests me is the contrast between
how
nouns are noncommittal about the existence of things and verbs and
their
adverbial additions do the job of affirming existence and placing it
in
time.

Nouns imply that the thing they name exists but they do so vaguely.
Nouns
are marked for many things, but whether the entity is real or
fictional,
alive or dead, now or not-now, is not one of them.  This is also true
for
proper nouns such as a person's name.  A name implies the existence of
the
person but carries no information about whether the person is living.

Verbs are all about time-consciousness-- not just past and present,
but
complete, incomplete, relevant, etc.  Verbs assert existence strongly,
even
when it was in the past.  _To be_, some have said, is the fundamental
verb
in any language.

The reason this all interests me is that I think it plays a role in
the
human religious tendency to believe in an afterlife.  Our desire for
the
dead to go on living is not contradicted by our syntax.  The name of
the
person remains unchanged from what it was when they lived.  Even a
sentence
such as "John died" presents him as the same syntactic source of action
that
he always was.  The verb asserts a condition in time, of course, so
the
message is mixed; the predicate tells us about JOhn's changed status
in
time.  "John is gone."  But even that is in the present tense--and an
easy
message to transcend not only because we may want to but because the
name
remains the same.


Brock Haussamen

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