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> English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'. Isn't "am going" a "present tense". That's how I perceive it a leas
by nnq 14y ago
> English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'.
Isn't "am going" a "present tense". That's how I perceive it a least, and indeed, it gives me the feeling of seeing the "future in the present tense", in the way of weak LTR. My native language is 'weak FTR', thought not in the list of researched ones. But I speak English "close to native" and tend to just "think in English" a lot, especially for topics for which all my learning material was in English. But I never felt "present tense continuous" when used as future anything different than just using the present tense for the future in my native language.
Does this mean that although I speak English close to native level, I actually have a different "understanding/feeling" of it than you true native English speakers?
(of course, to even think along the lines of the study I need tons of "suspension of disbelief" and need to ignore that there are zillions of ignored variables and no freaking way to determine direction of causality at this level! ...but just pretending it makes some sense :) ...)
EDIT: my bad, I looked at the actual paper and saw that my language was evaluated and is "strong FTR", just like English. So our use "present for future" is just like the "present continuous for future" in English, just a "spoken language shortcut" and we also have real proper future sense, like all other latin Languages. Even matches our "almost american style" pattern of spending and saving. I should remember never to start talking after reading an article based on a paper: I'd better shut up before reading the paper as science-reporters always manage to distort or ambiguate stuff... sigh...
- einhverfr 14y agoEnglish tenses are so much fun. She speaks Japanese but right now she's speaking English. The factory makes toys, but right now it is closed for the night. But when we get to Malay, things get really weird. Malay doesn't have tenses. You express timeframe with additional words. It does however have something like a tense, namely a sort of "bounding" quality but that's not like bounded vs unbounded aspects in English since bounding may occur either in time, in manner, or in social convention. Thus one can reduplicate for emphasis, to imply continuation, to imply reciprocity, or to imply a relaxation of social convention. Consequently we'd reduplicate the verb for "to beat" if we wanted to say "he frequently beats his son" or "give" if we wanted to say "they gave eachother gifts," or "walk" to mean "take a stroll," or "arrived" to indicate that in fact they arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. (Reduplication of nouns looks kind of like pluralization but it also involves an unbounding rather than a true pluralization.)
- nnq 14y agoThat's odd, as such a language would benefit most from a "word for letter" writing system like the Chinese one, yet Malay ended up being written in jawi arabic alphabet. I wonder if there are other languages with this type of "mismatch" between the writing system / alphabet and the language structure...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- colanderman 14y agoIsn't "am going" a "present tense". "Going" is a special case of subject+be+gerund. In modern colloquial English, anyone who says "I am going to X," means, based on context, either "I will be going to X soon" (i.e. a committed future action), or "I attend classes at X". If you want to talk about a concurrent action, you have to say either "I am going to X right now," or "I am on my way to X." Again, this doesn't apply (AFAIK) to any other gerund. e.g. if you say "I am walking to X," it means you are currently in the act of walking to X. English is weird.
- Gormo 14y agoI think that "going" in this sense is originated as an abstract metaphor; its literal present-tense meaning asserts that one is moving in the direction of some destination, and will arrive at that destination in the future. If you say "I am going to Los Angeles", it literally means that you're on your way to Los Angeles, and will arrive in Los Angeles at some point in the future; so if the destination is a verb, you're saying that you're metaphorically "moving in the direction" of performing whatever action the verb describes, and that the action will therefore be performed in the future. It seems that this meaning generally eclipses the literal meaning, so we use different verbs to more precisely describe the act of literally moving toward a physical destination, e.g. "traveling".