Dear Jeff,

You are right in dealing with an endless thing.

You wrote:
> Like this:  "I will remain in Missouri endlessly."
>
My reply: Can't you see, 'endlessly' is something about the future,
something we are not certain, so we put in another tense, not in Simple
Present? But this is the common way we treat something including the future.
Simple Present can guarantee nothing about the future.
By the way, you cannot imply to us it is 'endlessly' if you skip the time
adverb.

On the other hand as we are talking about the Simple Present tense, even
without the adverb 'endlessly', Simple Present can denote endless present
time, as Patricia imagines. This no one can believe. The world is changing,
everything will have an end. But Patricia wants to convince people that, by
using Simple Present, we have already an endless thing at hand.

A mother says, "My baby eats 5 bottles of milk every day." Because she uses
Simple Present, according to Patricia, the baby eats the amount of milk, for
the rest of his endless life. Where do we go wrong? How many times we use
Simple Present in one day? How many times we check if it is endless? Would
Patricia tell us how to check?

Shun
englishtense.com
=================



<But how to define 'endless'? How
<do native English speakers predict the action is endless?

Shun,

Like this:  "I will remain in Missouri endlessly."  You get the prediction
of "forever," and you get the bonus of a hint about how fond I am of the
prospect of forever in Missouri. It begins in the verb (particularly the
auxiliary) and completes its specificity in an adverb.

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

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/