If I work up the courage, I'll look it up.
Jeff Glauner
Associate Professor of English
Park University, Box 1303
8700 River Park Drive
Parkville MO 64152
[log in to unmask]
http://www.park.edu/jglauner/index.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Haussamen, Brock [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 9:16 AM
To: 'Glauner, Jeff '
Subject: RE: Verbs, tense, and existence
Jeff,
Thanks for the nice comment. It was an article--"Death and Syntax" (a
catchy title, I thought, playing on death and taxes) in Death Studies (isnt'
that a journal you just can't wait to subscribe to?) vol. 22, June 1998.
Brock
-----Original Message-----
From: Glauner, Jeff
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 5/18/01 10:49 AM
Subject: Re: Verbs, tense, and existence
Brock,
I enjoy the way your mind works in terms of verb analysis. It asserts a
philosophy of grammar rather than just rules. I hope you will write an
article on that topic expanding upon it and exploring its implications.
I
told my wife this morning that we need to find alternatives to eating
for
entertainment. I'm sure I could exchange a pork fritter with chips for
such
an article.
Jeff Glauner
Associate Professor of English
Park University, Box 1303
8700 River Park Drive
Parkville MO 64152
[log in to unmask]
http://www.park.edu/jglauner/index.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Haussamen, Brock [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2001 9:24 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Verbs, tense, and existence
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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