I have something to run past you, a sort of epiphany in regard to the tense
(T) node on the early GT verb formula.

After many years of teaching this as a tense marker (past or present), I
adjusted it to "past" or "not past" because "present" didn't fit with the
semantics of the modals (e.g., "will" is future).  Now I have reached an
additional conclusion about this marker, that it is not a tense marker at
all, but a finite verb phrase marker.

First, this marker is not found in nonfinite verb phrases.  The -ING of the
gerund and the -ING or -ED of the participle are not the same marker.  They
merely mark the participle or gerund as being what they are.

Second, since in finite verb phrases the marker only indicates past or not
past (where it indicates any tense at all), it is not particularly helpful
in explaining the tense of the full verb phrase.  For instance, "would have
gone tomorrow" is marked as past.  In reality, the adverb "tomorrow" makes
this fall into a future time, not past.  Even if we stay entirely in
syntactics for our analysis (ignoring semantics), the tense is not simple
past.  This causes significant confusion for my students (and endless
chagrin for their teacher in trying to justify it.

I am thinking of changing the name of this tense node to an "F" (for finite)
node to make it less confusing and a more accurate reflection of what it
really signifies.

I am, also, even more convinced that tense is not a study to be home-based
in syntax.  Its more natural home is in semantics although it overflows into
pragmatics, morphology, and syntactics.  I think that the GT verb formula is
sufficient systematic syntactic study of the untransformed verb phrase for
the elementary or secondary student.  The basics are there.  Further work on
conjugation, though interesting, pushes us into too much time spent studying
grammar to be acceptable in most school settings.

I am assuming that writing teachers would supplement this systematic
material with minilessons in areas that cause writing difficulty.  For
instance, students who substitute "do" for "does" should be provided the
word "does," its semantic implications, and its syntactic place in the
system.  I think we can do this effectively without ever having used terms
such as "perfect," "progressive," "subjunctive," etc.

Jeff Glauner
Park University