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 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/