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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