> An aspect of verb and tense that interests me is the contrast between.....

My reply: Yes, sometimes I, too, want to find something interesting between
verb and tense. It is because the fact is so cruel we cannot face it any
more.

Shun
englishtense.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Haussamen, Brock" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2001 10:23 PM
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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