7 ms·
What qualifies as a tense or not depends on your definitions of the term. Different linguists and traditions will have different standards and what is taught in
by rvense 2y ago
What qualifies as a tense or not depends on your definitions of the term. Different linguists and traditions will have different standards and what is taught in school is often not the terminology used in scientific description - it's actually very common for school teachers to teach things that any linguist would think was downright wrong. But terminology is a choice, not something where it really makes sense to say "is" or "is not", the question is how clear does your description end up. (And as always, when you argue about whether or not something is an X, you're not so much talking about the thing as you're talking about the definition of the category X.)
I studied Middle Eastern languages (though mostly Arabic and Persian) and linguistics at a university in northern Europe, and we would treat tense, aspect, and mood as different categories. Often they are distinct and verbs are conjugated both for time and e.g. evidentiality and thus it is fruitful to have two categories. I think this is the case for Turkish, e.g. see how Wikipedia lists the conjugations[0] here as a two-dimensional system. The article uses the term tense (explicitly 'for simplicity'), but I think it makes sense to have different names for the different categories - so tense would refer to the rows in that schema, and mood would refer to the columns.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language#Verb_tenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language#Verb_tenses
- sedatk 2y agoSure, I don't disagree that it has multi-dimensionality in terms of semantics. But, it signifies time. When you use "gossip tense" on a verb by itself, it always signifies that something happened in the past, there is no ambiguity about it. How is that this kind of unmistakable representation of time escapes from being a tense is a mystery to me. I'd love to be corrected if I'm missing anything.
- mplewis 2y agoThe inferential mood (your "gossip tense") is more related to mood (signals a particular relationship to truth or reality) than tense (signifies a relationship to time).
- sedatk 2y agoWhy isn't it the case with the use of the term "present perfect tense" in English then, despite "perfect" being an aspect, not even a tense? How is present perfect closer to a tense, but this one closer to a mood? What's the difference?
- rvense 2y agoWell, "present perfect" would refer to a specific construction that has both tense (vs. past perfect) and aspect (vs. present continuous). But as per my other comment, if you're just listing all the constructions an English word can take for your students to memorise, you can just call them all tenses and be done with it.
- marcellus23 2y agoYou're correct that it conveys some temporal information. You're incorrect that that makes it a tense. The imperative mood in English ("Go do this!") can be said to convey a future act. After all, you can't order someone to have done something in the past, or to be doing something right now. But that doesn't mean we refer to it as the "imperative tense". If you look up the definition of grammatical mood on Wikipedia, along with tense and aspect, can you explain why you think this meets the definition of a tense and not a mood?
- amoss 2y ago"Keep at it!", "Hold the line!" appear to be orders to be doing something right now.
- mkl 2y agoThey're orders to continue a present activity into the future.
- amoss 2y agoIs the continuation not an activity in the present time, or that starts in the present time? Characterizing this as being in the futures seems to be an incorrect boundary case.
- mkl 2y agoThey're definitely orders about the future. "Keep at it" has the present as context, "hold the line" is a bit ambiguous, "don't let it happen again" has the past as context, but they're all talking about the future.
- sedatk 2y agoI didn't say it doesn't act as a mood. I'm saying that it acts as a tense, and therefore I can name it as such, as how grammar forefathers named "present perfect tense" in English despite all the objections from HN about "perfect" being an aspect. :)
- franciscop 2y agoIt's very funny as a Spaniard since "verbal tense" in Spanish is literally "verbal time" (tiempo(s) verbal), so it's unequivocally not able to describe things that are not temporal: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiempo_verbal https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiempo_verbal Even more interestingly, that article links in English to the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93mood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93m...
- rvense 2y agoEnglish "Tense" is also derived from "tempus"!
- the_gipsy 2y ago> unequivocally not able to describe things that are not temporal I don't think you can take it that literally. The are conditional and subjective verb forms: "Comería cuando llegaras".
- anticensor 2y agoSame in Turkish, we call them "eylemin zamanları" which stands for "times of verbs".
- anticensor 2y agoYeah, morphologically two dimensional, but semantically 1.5: 17 or so tense-aspect-mood combinations make sense, fewer than 25 the underlying morphology would suggest.
- egeozcan 2y agoBut "-miş" denotes something happening in the past, in gossip form, on its own. It's trickier than what that table shows IMHO.