There are 23 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Articles
From: MorphemeAddict
1.2. Re: Articles
From: Sam Stutter
1.3. Re: Articles
From: Garth Wallace
1.4. Re: Articles
From: Nikolay Ivankov
1.5. Re: Articles
From: Roman Rausch
1.6. Re: Articles
From: taliesin the storyteller
1.7. Re: Articles
From: Nikolay Ivankov
1.8. Re: Articles
From: Padraic Brown
2a. Re: Use of Interlanguages?
From: Gary Shannon
2b. Re: Use of Interlanguages?
From: Logan Kearsley
3a. Re: Judoon
From: John Erickson
4a. Verbs for Aspects
From: neo gu
4b. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: George Corley
4c. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Charlie Brickner
4d. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Peter Cyrus
4e. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Sam Stutter
4f. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Peter Cyrus
4g. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Sam Stutter
4h. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Peter Cyrus
4i. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Peter Cyrus
4j. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Sam Stutter
4k. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Sam Stutter
4l. Re: Verbs for Aspects
From: Padraic Brown
Messages
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1.1. Re: Articles
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 3:28 pm ((PST))
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Roman Rausch <[email protected]> wrote:
> >using articles for definiteness / etc isn't, of course, the only way to go
>
> Yeah, the statement 'Russian has no articles' has always struck me as not
> really fair without explaining that it may use word order instead:
> VS = indefinite: _so stola upal karandash_ 'from table fell pencil' = 'A
> pencil fell from the table'
> SV = definite: _karandash upal so stola_ 'pencil fell from table' = 'THE
> pencil fell from the table'
>
> Despite a BA in Russian, this was never mentioned in any of my course
work. I still find it a little unsettling. Can anyone recommend a text that
covers this?
stevo
> >In caseful languages such as German, possessive adjectives are
> >sometimes considered the genitive case of the pronoun, but I think
> >that's wrong - "mein" in "mein Buch" is a possessive adjective, not
> >the genitive of "ich" (I). (The genitive does exist but is rarely used
> >- the only case I can think of is after the [few] prepositions that
> >take the genitive, such as "Wir gedachten seiner", we commemorated
> >him, literally, we thought of his.)
>
> German endings are so messy, I often need a look into Gothic to see what's
> going on:
> gen. pronoun: _meina_, e.g. _nist meina wairžs_ 'is not worthy of me'
> poss. adjective: _meins_, inflected like a strong adjective: _razn mein_
> 'my
> house'
>
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.2. Re: Articles
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 4:05 pm ((PST))
I'm sorry, I was trying to say that it is a non-content morpheme but brain not
engaged. In fact, I've been trying to think what the correct term is: there's
every possibility it could be used for a noun, adjective, verb or adverb. All
forms twent- are numbers. Mỳr- could be used to form 4 separate nouns, 4
adjectives, 4 verbs and 4 adverbs, which have no semantic relation, from the
same lexicon entry. Twent- only suggests twenty-X and twentieth. Mỳr- could
suggest cat, shed, skirt, natural yoghurt, feline, ensconced, flurried, smooth,
chase, disguise, etc, etc
It doesn't, but other nouns do (and I don't have my dictionary to hand).
I completely agree that the Spanish thing is not such a good analogy. Perhaps
tone in Mandarin? Seeing "wo shi" doesn't necessarily mean "I am". Or perhaps
just the sequence of phonemes "epi-": epistle? episode? epilepsy?
Sam Stutter
[email protected]
"No e na il cu barri"
On 14 Jan 2012, at 22:40, BPJ <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2012-01-14 22:09, Sam Stutter wrote:
>
>> In Nỳspèkè at least, "mỳr" doesn't*mean* anything,
>> it's like having the Spanish "llam" without the +ar
>> or +ó or whatever to conjugate the verb.
>
> It still means something even if it's not a free
> morpheme and can't make a well-formed word on its own,
> or would you say that _-ty_ in _twenty, thirty, forty_
> &c. doesn't mean anything? For that matter _twen-,
> thir-, fif-_ are also bound allomorphs. Would you claim
> that they don't mean anything because of that? Wouldn't
> that make _twenty, thirty, fifty_ meaningless words,
> being made up of meaningless morphemes? Surely
> wellformedness and meaningfulness, or boundness and
> meaninglessness, are not the same thing!
>
> /bpj
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.3. Re: Articles
Posted by: "Garth Wallace" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 4:55 pm ((PST))
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've always kind of liked the idea of using the article as the carrier of
> case:
>
> The.NOM cat climbed the.ACC tree.
>
> That way the only case inflections that need to be learned are the
> inflections of the definite and indefinite articles. The articles
> could also inflect for number so that plural forms of nouns would not
> be needed.
I ended up doing that in my long-abandoned "reformed" Latin, mainly
because I wanted to keep case but also wanted to keep the highly
regularized system of gender & number suffixes, which it would have
conflicted with. It was a solution I was never entirely happy with.
Similar concerns with verb inflections led to a really awkward and
artificial system of pre-verbs.
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.4. Re: Articles
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 8:34 pm ((PST))
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> From the perspective of symbolic logic, languages that lack articles
> are defective in that they cannot distinguish between a class as a
> whole and a specific or non-specific instance of a member of that
> class. That makes them logically kind of mushy. ... Speaking as a
> software engineer, that is.
>
> --gary
>
Russian has been mentionaed in the ansers quite a number of time already,
but let me make some additional examples to clarify the picture.
First of all, I'll start with Latvian. It has no articles, but there is the
(in)definite marking, which is done by means of suffixes on ajdectives. So,
for instance:
sarkans krekls = a red shirt
sarkanais krekls = the red shirt
balta jura = a white sea
balt*� jura = the white sea*
Of course, it is not that every word necessarily has an adjective which
clarifies whether we are dealing with some (in)definite object, but still.
Now, Russian used to have the same way of distinguishing before. All the
adjectives (with some exceptional positions) and all the preverbs in
preverbal clauses (I think it is this position) are marked with the
postfixes -iy -aya -oye (depending on gender). These are the remnants of
personal pronouns which (as I guess by analogy, cause I'm only a native
speaker, not a linguist) were previously used in the same way as in
Latvian, before finally virtually all adjectives aquired them, so that the
marking was lost again. The fact that an analogue of an article may even
disappear from the language just shows that having an article is by no
means obligatory to make language non-defective.
To say more, sometimes we use the words for 'one' and 'this' as a
substitute of articles, but this is not obligatory.
And, by the way, Japanese, despite a rather fixed word order, lacks
articles as well. Still, it has more than a thousand years of literary
tradition, and a sufficient number of speakers in each epoch: more than 5
million at the time when "Genji Monogatari" and "Beowulf" were written, and
about 12 in the times of Tokugawa and Shakespeare - four times as many as
in Britain. Thus, the fact that English has "invented" articles may not be
even described as a "repairing" or "improvement" of the language when
spoken by a large number of people or undergoing a development due to the
need of poetry and rhetoric.
Kolya
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.5. Re: Articles
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 4:16 am ((PST))
>To then insist that this statement is unfair unless I then
>detail all the means these four different languages may use
>to make the meaning clear in given contexts would IMHO not
>merely be tedious but also, in the end, confusing.
You certainly don't have to mention *all* the other means, but I believe it
is necessary to mention that they exist, otherwise it misleads into thinking
that there is no other way to express (in)definiteness, as evidenced in this
thread.
> Despite a BA in Russian, this was never mentioned in any of my course
> work. I still find it a little unsettling. Can anyone recommend a text that
> covers this?
I don't know about textbooks since I'm a native speaker, but the reference
grammar by Alan Timberlake, for example, has a final chapter called 'The
presentation of information'.
>And, by the way, Japanese, despite a rather fixed word order, lacks
>articles as well. [...]
In Japanese, of course, there is explicit topic marking:
empitsu ga ochita 'pencil NOM fall-PAST' = 'A pencil fell down'
empitsu wa ochita 'pencil TOP fall-PAST' = 'THE pencil fell down'
I find it much more elegant than dragging a ballast of small words
everywhere you go.
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.6. Re: Articles
Posted by: "taliesin the storyteller" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 4:37 am ((PST))
* Logan Kearsley said on 2012-01-14 21:18:03 +0100
> That would provide a good reason to have personal
> articles- otherwise, people's names couldn't be case-marked.
Uhm, why can't you treat a name as just any other noun?
Logan-NOM talked about Gary-GEN's word-PL-ACC.
IIRC Latin did it: "Et tu, Brute!"
t.
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.7. Re: Articles
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 6:11 am ((PST))
>
>
> >And, by the way, Japanese, despite a rather fixed word order, lacks
> >articles as well. [...]
>
> In Japanese, of course, there is explicit topic marking:
> empitsu ga ochita 'pencil NOM fall-PAST' = 'A pencil fell down'
> empitsu wa ochita 'pencil TOP fall-PAST' = 'THE pencil fell down'
> I find it much more elegant than dragging a ballast of small words
> everywhere you go.
>
But this does not mean, that the rhematic case "ga" may be applied to the
object that we already know. Say, we may have the following constructon:
- Kono oto-wa nan desu ka?
- Watashi-no empitsu-wa desu. Kono empitsu-ga tsukue-kara ochita.
I'm not sure I'm writing it right, I've almost forgotten that little of
Japanese I used to know. So, if I'm not terribly wrong, we that the
rhematic case is applied to the pencil we already know, and just
emphasizing that it fell from the table.
Messages in this topic (181)
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1.8. Re: Articles
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 6:13 am ((PST))
--- On Sun, 1/15/12, taliesin the storyteller <[email protected]> wrote:
> > That would provide a good reason to have personal
> > articles- otherwise, people's names couldn't be
> case-marked.
>
> Uhm, why can't you treat a name as just any other noun?
I think that was rather the point: he's NOT treating names just like other
nouns. If you can't treat a name like any other noun, then you'd need some
other ways for names to work in a sentence and make any sense at all.
> Logan-NOM talked about Gary-GEN's word-PL-ACC.
>
> IIRC Latin did it: "Et tu, Brute!"
Indeed. I can say "Saw the-ACC mouse the-NOM cat", but if names have
no articles upon which to hang the case markers, what about John and
Marc? "Saw Marc John". Whom saw who?
If the language had personal articles upon which to hang the case, twould
be easy: "Saw Mr-NOM Marc Mr-ACC John". Otherwise, you might need some
kind of horrible circumlocution like "Saw the-NOM my friend Marc the-ACC
I-don't-know-man John". Or "There was John and saw the-NOM his eye a-ACC
man, and the-PAT man was seen and he was Marc."
> t.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (181)
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2a. Re: Use of Interlanguages?
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 3:38 pm ((PST))
My take on a machine translation interlanguage is that a document is
written, by a human author, in this interlanguage so that a machine
can read the interlanguage and produce a translation into any human
language.
Production of natural language by computer is trivial compared to
parsing human language by computer. For one thing, the grammar does
not need to be complete, it only needs to be adequate to the task of
producing a small subset of possible sentences of the language. So it
seems to me that the whole purpose of the interlanguage is to provide
INPUT to the computer which is already parsed and unambiguous so that
the computer can do the easy part of translation, which is producing
equivalent sentences in the target language.
So for that purpose human usability is necessary. At least that's the
approach I took when I started playing around with my own machine
translation interlingua back in 2003-2004:
http://fiziwig.com/chomp/index.html
Another approach to a machine translation interlingua would be to have
a large collection of sentence templates in the various target
languages. These would be classified by their "purpose", e.g. en:"I am
from Detroit." and es:"Soy de Detroit." would be classified as
"stating place of origin" in some, probably numeric, classification
code.
Then the interlingua would consist of a template number and the bits
and pieces that need to be stuffed into the template. Thus
"214:Detroit" selects template 214 in the appropriate language ("Soy
de ____") and fills in the blanks with the data that follows.
That's a trivial example, of course, and the actual stuffing of values
into the template would also use table lookups for nouns and verb
conjugations, so the actual template might be "____ from ____" with
tables like: "I am|you are|he is|she is|we are|you are|they are|" used
to indirectly fill in the template slots.
Even more complex sentences like "If she expects them to give her five
days off with pay, she's going to be disappointed." can be abstracted
into templates like "
If /a/ /b/ to give /c/ /d/, /e/ /f/ /g/.
a = a person or animate being
b = verb of the class: expect/want/desire/need/hope for/thinks that/...
c = pronoun form of "a"
d = the thing given which can be broken down by another sub-template:
e = pronoun form of "a"
f = tense aux phrase: is going to be/will be/must have been/...
g = state of mind: disappointed/happy/upset/angry/delirious/...
Thing given (noun phrase) sub-template
/a/ /b/ with /c/
a = count
b = unit of time from the set: second/minute/hour/day/week/month/year/...
c = noun
So the interlanguage statement might be something like:
3115(she;expect;n72(five;day-off;pay);FUT;disappointed)
Where the numerics are the template numbers. So for each language
there would be a template 3115 and a noun phrase template n72, and the
actual words in the parameter list would be language-independent and
disambiguated.
--gary
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Logan Kearsley <[email protected]> wrote:
--- But there's no
> reason why a translation interlanguage should need to be usable by
> humans, and a machine can just use a "language" that is just an
> abstract syntax tree (and lots of such software does, though not the
> state-of-the-art as far as I know).
>
> So, it seems to me that a machine interlanguage can really only be a
> type of artlang- the kind of thing that comes from asking "if I wanted
> to do this for whatever reason, what would it look like?" rather than
> "what's the best way to actually solve this problem?"
Messages in this topic (4)
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2b. Re: Use of Interlanguages?
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 10:55 pm ((PST))
On 14 January 2012 16:12, MorphemeAddict <[email protected]> wrote:
> Pre-editing is one way to do this. Someone disambiguates the text without
> knowing the target language, but aware that such and such is ambiguous in
> the source language.
One can do that using just about any language as the intermediary,
though; you just train your translators not to actually render the
text directly, but to describe and annotate it for the benefit of
someone else writing the actual target language translations. The
question, then, is how might one design a language specifically to
make that disambiguation process 'transparent'; e.g., such that you
never have to write side notes like "By the way, this refers to an
older brother in this context, but that information is not present in
the literal source text, so don't bother stating it in other languages
that don't distinguish older/younger relation terms", and that sort of
thing is simply grammaticalized or otherwise implicit in the
interlanguage text.
On 14 January 2012 16:38, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> My take on a machine translation interlanguage is that a document is
> written, by a human author, in this interlanguage so that a machine
> can read the interlanguage and produce a translation into any human
> language.
In that case, I find the terminology rather misleading. A machine
translation *source* language makes sense. It's just a special case of
a language designed to be spoken by people to machines (which itself
presents and interesting design problem for a certain set of
engelangs). But while a human may employ it as an interlanguage if
translating some document originally composed in a different language,
I would hardly call it a *machine* interlanguage, as long as the
machine is not generating it. Your take with Chomp seems to me rather
different (and now that I'm aware of it, maybe this is what Rick had
in mind with Latejami as well; I don't know). In that case, the
human-usable language is needed only to allow inspection and
correction of the computer's automatically generated intermediate
representation. But even there, the standard of human-usability is
rather different than it would be for a regular human language. It
does not actually need to be speakable; it just needs to be
*readable*, and possibly writable, which allows for a lot more leeway
in design.
-l.
Messages in this topic (4)
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3a. Re: Judoon
Posted by: "John Erickson" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 14, 2012 9:53 pm ((PST))
Welcome to the list!
I look forward to seeing your take on Entish.
Messages in this topic (4)
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4a. Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "neo gu" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 1:22 am ((PST))
In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
progressive
habitual
perfect (distinct from perfective)
semelfactive
So, I'm looking for suggestions.
--
neogu
Messages in this topic (12)
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4b. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 2:40 am ((PST))
Well, I would guess that those verb would have been serving as auxiliaries,
so very semantically weak verbs make sense: copulas, "have", and so on.
On Sunday, January 15, 2012, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
> In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
> implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
> I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
>
> progressive
> habitual
> perfect (distinct from perfective)
> semelfactive
>
> So, I'm looking for suggestions.
>
> --
> neogu
>
Messages in this topic (12)
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4c. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Charlie Brickner" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 4:10 am ((PST))
On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:21:26 -0500, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
>implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
>I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
>
>progressive
>habitual
>perfect (distinct from perfective)
>semelfactive
>
>So, I'm looking for suggestions.
The Senjecan verb is inflected only for one of the three moods. Aspects are
indicated lexically.
The progressive is indicated with the verb 'm�mha', proceed, used with the
present participle (called the agent participle in Senjecas).
The habitual is indicated with the verb 'g�a', be accustomed to, used with the
supine.
The semelfactive aspect is inherent in the meaning of the verb itself.
I am a bit confused about perfect/perfective. I hope someone can clarify the
difference for me. I am accustomed to using "perfect" for the tense: present
perfect, etc.
Charlie
Messages in this topic (12)
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4d. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Peter Cyrus" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 4:24 am ((PST))
On the same topic, can anyone suggest an example of a language that
marks aspect grammatically?
I don't consider Russian to be such a case, since corresponding
perfective and imperfective verbs are lexically different.
Nor do I consider Chinese -le and -guo to be such a case, (and -guo is
perfect, anyway).
In English, non-stative verbs are lexically imperfective (Vendler's
activities), perfective (achievements) or both (accomplishments), with
no perceived need to mark the two aspects differently in the third
case; we don't say I read the book for an hour/ I readed the book in
an hour.
Russian is the only language in my ken that reliably always has both
aspects, but often the perfective adds an additional meaning (or
several) that, in another language, would be a different verb. So
maybe the Russian system is not marking aspect as much as it is
telling us, for each achievement verb, what the appropriate activity
verb is. It's as if the English word "see" pointed to the verb "look"
in its morphology, like Chinese kanjian points to kanikan.
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Charlie Brickner
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:21:26 -0500, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
>>implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
>>I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
>>
>>progressive
>>habitual
>>perfect (distinct from perfective)
>>semelfactive
>>
>>So, I'm looking for suggestions.
>
> The Senjecan verb is inflected only for one of the three moods. Aspects are
> indicated lexically.
>
> The progressive is indicated with the verb 'mémha', proceed, used with the
> present participle (called the agent participle in Senjecas).
> The habitual is indicated with the verb 'gúa', be accustomed to, used with the
> supine.
> The semelfactive aspect is inherent in the meaning of the verb itself.
>
> I am a bit confused about perfect/perfective. I hope someone can clarify the
> difference for me. I am accustomed to using "perfect" for the tense: present
> perfect, etc.
>
> Charlie
Messages in this topic (12)
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4e. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 4:40 am ((PST))
On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:10, Charlie Brickner wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:21:26 -0500, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
>> implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
>> I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
>>
>> progressive
>> habitual
>> perfect (distinct from perfective)
>> semelfactive
>>
>> So, I'm looking for suggestions.
>
> The Senjecan verb is inflected only for one of the three moods. Aspects are
> indicated lexically.
>
> The progressive is indicated with the verb 'm�mha', proceed, used with the
> present participle (called the agent participle in Senjecas).
> The habitual is indicated with the verb 'g�a', be accustomed to, used with
> the
> supine.
> The semelfactive aspect is inherent in the meaning of the verb itself.
>
> I am a bit confused about perfect/perfective. I hope someone can clarify the
> difference for me. I am accustomed to using "perfect" for the tense: present
>
> perfect, etc.
>
> Charlie
Perfect is an aspect, as are the pluperfect, continuative, etc. The perfect (in
English) is formed with the conjugation of "have" + past participle. "I have
seen". The pluperfect is simply the past perfect aspect in English, although I
believe that it can get more complicated in other languages. The continuative
aspect (which is what I meant by the gerund being used more in English than
other languages, as AFAIK, Spanish et al prefer to use the imperfect tense
instead of the continuative past) is formed in English is formed with the
conjugation of "be" + gerund. "I am seeing". Then you can conjugate your
auxiliary verbs however you like and then combine the aspects to have stuff
like "I had been seeing".
The perfective is another aspect which, because it doesn't exist in any real
sense in English, is hard to explain / understand for us English natives. As
far as I understand it, the perfective gives the sense that, not only has the
action finished, but the action has achieved its aim. Wikipedia gives the
examples of "look" becomes "see" in the perfective, "listen" becomes "hear" in
the perfective and "be able to" becomes "succeed".
Messages in this topic (12)
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4f. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Peter Cyrus" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 4:50 am ((PST))
You could make a good argument that perfect is an aspect, but it's
usually called a tense.
Perfective and Imperfective are the two basic aspects, and we have
them in English, too. The perfective aspect regards an action as an
indivisible unit, a point in time. The imperfective aspect regards an
action as a process, with duration. So "I read the book a week ago"
is perfective, and "I read the book in bed" is imperfective. The
first describes the result, the second the process.
Some English verbs, like "search", are only imperfective. Some, like
"find" are only perfective. You can't say "I found the book for an
hour", and you can't say "All of a sudden, I searched".
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:10, Charlie Brickner wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:21:26 -0500, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
>>> implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
>>> I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
>>>
>>> progressive
>>> habitual
>>> perfect (distinct from perfective)
>>> semelfactive
>>>
>>> So, I'm looking for suggestions.
>>
>> The Senjecan verb is inflected only for one of the three moods. Aspects are
>> indicated lexically.
>>
>> The progressive is indicated with the verb 'mémha', proceed, used with the
>> present participle (called the agent participle in Senjecas).
>> The habitual is indicated with the verb 'gúa', be accustomed to, used with
>> the
>> supine.
>> The semelfactive aspect is inherent in the meaning of the verb itself.
>>
>> I am a bit confused about perfect/perfective. I hope someone can clarify the
>> difference for me. I am accustomed to using "perfect" for the tense: present
>> perfect, etc.
>>
>> Charlie
>
> Perfect is an aspect, as are the pluperfect, continuative, etc. The perfect
> (in English) is formed with the conjugation of "have" + past participle. "I
> have seen". The pluperfect is simply the past perfect aspect in English,
> although I believe that it can get more complicated in other languages. The
> continuative aspect (which is what I meant by the gerund being used more in
> English than other languages, as AFAIK, Spanish et al prefer to use the
> imperfect tense instead of the continuative past) is formed in English is
> formed with the conjugation of "be" + gerund. "I am seeing". Then you can
> conjugate your auxiliary verbs however you like and then combine the aspects
> to have stuff like "I had been seeing".
>
> The perfective is another aspect which, because it doesn't exist in any real
> sense in English, is hard to explain / understand for us English natives. As
> far as I understand it, the perfective gives the sense that, not only has the
> action finished, but the action has achieved its aim. Wikipedia gives the
> examples of "look" becomes "see" in the perfective, "listen" becomes "hear"
> in the perfective and "be able to" becomes "succeed".
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
4g. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:03 am ((PST))
I'm wondering if there's some international disparity when it comes to the
distinction. In my experience of foreign language study, degree in linguistics,
independent research projects, etc the perfect has *always* been considered an
aspect. Perhaps this is where the confusion about perfect vs. perfective has
arisen. Do some schools of thought consider them differently? Or do some
schools of thought use the terms differently?
English, speaking with my Syntactic-Theory-hat on, has only two tenses: the
past and non-past. Speaking with my Spanish-student-hat on, the perfect and
continuative/progressive are treated separately as they are aspects, not tenses.
I might see if I still have the references I was given by lecturers, although
that might involve a trip to the John Rylands and I haven't got my new bus pass
yet :)
Sam Stutter
[email protected]
"No e na il cu barri"
On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:50, Peter Cyrus wrote:
> You could make a good argument that perfect is an aspect, but it's
> usually called a tense.
>
> Perfective and Imperfective are the two basic aspects, and we have
> them in English, too. The perfective aspect regards an action as an
> indivisible unit, a point in time. The imperfective aspect regards an
> action as a process, with duration. So "I read the book a week ago"
> is perfective, and "I read the book in bed" is imperfective. The
> first describes the result, the second the process.
>
> Some English verbs, like "search", are only imperfective. Some, like
> "find" are only perfective. You can't say "I found the book for an
> hour", and you can't say "All of a sudden, I searched".
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
4h. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Peter Cyrus" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:12 am ((PST))
I would call it an aspect, too, but it's stative, not active, and so
it doesn't have the perfective/imperfective distinction.
The Perfect should mean "present relevance of a past action", as in "I
have read the book" (so I know what it says/so I can give it to you/so
I don't want to see the movie). Not so different from "I like the
book" - it's a state. But the perfect is a kind of permanent state :
we can't say "Right now, I'm having read the book", as if, in two
minutes, I won't have read it any more.
The perfective/imperfective thing is for actions, not states. You
could say that states are always imperfective, or maybe better, say
that the imperfective is a way of expressing an action AS a state.
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm wondering if there's some international disparity when it comes to the
> distinction. In my experience of foreign language study, degree in
> linguistics, independent research projects, etc the perfect has *always* been
> considered an aspect. Perhaps this is where the confusion about perfect vs.
> perfective has arisen. Do some schools of thought consider them differently?
> Or do some schools of thought use the terms differently?
>
> English, speaking with my Syntactic-Theory-hat on, has only two tenses: the
> past and non-past. Speaking with my Spanish-student-hat on, the perfect and
> continuative/progressive are treated separately as they are aspects, not
> tenses.
>
> I might see if I still have the references I was given by lecturers, although
> that might involve a trip to the John Rylands and I haven't got my new bus
> pass yet :)
>
>
> Sam Stutter
> [email protected]
> "No e na il cu barri"
>
> On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:50, Peter Cyrus wrote:
>
>> You could make a good argument that perfect is an aspect, but it's
>> usually called a tense.
>>
>> Perfective and Imperfective are the two basic aspects, and we have
>> them in English, too. The perfective aspect regards an action as an
>> indivisible unit, a point in time. The imperfective aspect regards an
>> action as a process, with duration. So "I read the book a week ago"
>> is perfective, and "I read the book in bed" is imperfective. The
>> first describes the result, the second the process.
>>
>> Some English verbs, like "search", are only imperfective. Some, like
>> "find" are only perfective. You can't say "I found the book for an
>> hour", and you can't say "All of a sudden, I searched".
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
4i. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Peter Cyrus" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:15 am ((PST))
Another distinction is the when/while distinction.
When I saw him = perfective
While I was looking at him = imperfective
or the in/for distinction
I read the book in an hour = perfective
I read the book for an hour = imperfective
But they are lousy names.
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Peter Cyrus <[email protected]> wrote:
> I would call it an aspect, too, but it's stative, not active, and so
> it doesn't have the perfective/imperfective distinction.
>
> The Perfect should mean "present relevance of a past action", as in "I
> have read the book" (so I know what it says/so I can give it to you/so
> I don't want to see the movie). Not so different from "I like the
> book" - it's a state. But the perfect is a kind of permanent state :
> we can't say "Right now, I'm having read the book", as if, in two
> minutes, I won't have read it any more.
>
> The perfective/imperfective thing is for actions, not states. You
> could say that states are always imperfective, or maybe better, say
> that the imperfective is a way of expressing an action AS a state.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm wondering if there's some international disparity when it comes to the
>> distinction. In my experience of foreign language study, degree in
>> linguistics, independent research projects, etc the perfect has *always*
>> been considered an aspect. Perhaps this is where the confusion about perfect
>> vs. perfective has arisen. Do some schools of thought consider them
>> differently? Or do some schools of thought use the terms differently?
>>
>> English, speaking with my Syntactic-Theory-hat on, has only two tenses: the
>> past and non-past. Speaking with my Spanish-student-hat on, the perfect and
>> continuative/progressive are treated separately as they are aspects, not
>> tenses.
>>
>> I might see if I still have the references I was given by lecturers,
>> although that might involve a trip to the John Rylands and I haven't got my
>> new bus pass yet :)
>>
>>
>> Sam Stutter
>> [email protected]
>> "No e na il cu barri"
>>
>> On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:50, Peter Cyrus wrote:
>>
>>> You could make a good argument that perfect is an aspect, but it's
>>> usually called a tense.
>>>
>>> Perfective and Imperfective are the two basic aspects, and we have
>>> them in English, too. The perfective aspect regards an action as an
>>> indivisible unit, a point in time. The imperfective aspect regards an
>>> action as a process, with duration. So "I read the book a week ago"
>>> is perfective, and "I read the book in bed" is imperfective. The
>>> first describes the result, the second the process.
>>>
>>> Some English verbs, like "search", are only imperfective. Some, like
>>> "find" are only perfective. You can't say "I found the book for an
>>> hour", and you can't say "All of a sudden, I searched".
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
4j. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:36 am ((PST))
AFAIK the perfective and imperfective as technical terms refer to specific
grammatical constructions in those languages which have it, although the
*concepts* can be discussed in other languages. An analogy would be saying that
the English "I hope I will see" is an example of the optative mood: it fulfils
the same function but in English it doesn't exist: it doesn't actually have it
as a condition of the main verb.
The Syntactic Theory reference is "Lexical Functional Syntax" by Joan Bresnan
(Blackwell 2004). Hell, it's boring :)
There's another really good book which attempted to survey all the features of
the world's languages under a series of broad grammar features with stuff like:
"The following tenses are known to exist:"
But I can't remember what it's called. Will get back to you on that one.
On 15 Jan 2012, at 13:15, Peter Cyrus wrote:
> Another distinction is the when/while distinction.
>
> When I saw him = perfective
>
> While I was looking at him = imperfective
>
> or the in/for distinction
>
> I read the book in an hour = perfective
>
> I read the book for an hour = imperfective
>
> But they are lousy names.
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Peter Cyrus <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I would call it an aspect, too, but it's stative, not active, and so
>> it doesn't have the perfective/imperfective distinction.
>>
>> The Perfect should mean "present relevance of a past action", as in "I
>> have read the book" (so I know what it says/so I can give it to you/so
>> I don't want to see the movie). Not so different from "I like the
>> book" - it's a state. But the perfect is a kind of permanent state :
>> we can't say "Right now, I'm having read the book", as if, in two
>> minutes, I won't have read it any more.
>>
>> The perfective/imperfective thing is for actions, not states. You
>> could say that states are always imperfective, or maybe better, say
>> that the imperfective is a way of expressing an action AS a state.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> I'm wondering if there's some international disparity when it comes to the
>>> distinction. In my experience of foreign language study, degree in
>>> linguistics, independent research projects, etc the perfect has *always*
>>> been considered an aspect. Perhaps this is where the confusion about
>>> perfect vs. perfective has arisen. Do some schools of thought consider them
>>> differently? Or do some schools of thought use the terms differently?
>>>
>>> English, speaking with my Syntactic-Theory-hat on, has only two tenses: the
>>> past and non-past. Speaking with my Spanish-student-hat on, the perfect and
>>> continuative/progressive are treated separately as they are aspects, not
>>> tenses.
>>>
>>> I might see if I still have the references I was given by lecturers,
>>> although that might involve a trip to the John Rylands and I haven't got my
>>> new bus pass yet :)
>>>
>>>
>>> Sam Stutter
>>> [email protected]
>>> "No e na il cu barri"
>>>
>>> On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:50, Peter Cyrus wrote:
>>>
>>>> You could make a good argument that perfect is an aspect, but it's
>>>> usually called a tense.
>>>>
>>>> Perfective and Imperfective are the two basic aspects, and we have
>>>> them in English, too. The perfective aspect regards an action as an
>>>> indivisible unit, a point in time. The imperfective aspect regards an
>>>> action as a process, with duration. So "I read the book a week ago"
>>>> is perfective, and "I read the book in bed" is imperfective. The
>>>> first describes the result, the second the process.
>>>>
>>>> Some English verbs, like "search", are only imperfective. Some, like
>>>> "find" are only perfective. You can't say "I found the book for an
>>>> hour", and you can't say "All of a sudden, I searched".
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
4k. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:41 am ((PST))
Damn, sent that too early. I forgot to mention that I have in my hands "A
Student's Grammar of the English Language" by Sidney Greenbaum and Randolph
Quirk (Longman 1997). It's second hand and smells lovely :)
"We recognise two aspects in English; the perfect and the progressive".
Sam Stutter
[email protected]
"No e na il cu barri"
On 15 Jan 2012, at 13:36, Sam Stutter wrote:
> AFAIK the perfective and imperfective as technical terms refer to specific
> grammatical constructions in those languages which have it, although the
> *concepts* can be discussed in other languages. An analogy would be saying
> that the English "I hope I will see" is an example of the optative mood: it
> fulfils the same function but in English it doesn't exist: it doesn't
> actually have it as a condition of the main verb.
>
> The Syntactic Theory reference is "Lexical Functional Syntax" by Joan Bresnan
> (Blackwell 2004). Hell, it's boring :)
>
> There's another really good book which attempted to survey all the features
> of the world's languages under a series of broad grammar features with stuff
> like:
>
> "The following tenses are known to exist:"
>
> But I can't remember what it's called. Will get back to you on that one.
>
> On 15 Jan 2012, at 13:15, Peter Cyrus wrote:
>
>> Another distinction is the when/while distinction.
>>
>> When I saw him = perfective
>>
>> While I was looking at him = imperfective
>>
>> or the in/for distinction
>>
>> I read the book in an hour = perfective
>>
>> I read the book for an hour = imperfective
>>
>> But they are lousy names.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Peter Cyrus <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> I would call it an aspect, too, but it's stative, not active, and so
>>> it doesn't have the perfective/imperfective distinction.
>>>
>>> The Perfect should mean "present relevance of a past action", as in "I
>>> have read the book" (so I know what it says/so I can give it to you/so
>>> I don't want to see the movie). Not so different from "I like the
>>> book" - it's a state. But the perfect is a kind of permanent state :
>>> we can't say "Right now, I'm having read the book", as if, in two
>>> minutes, I won't have read it any more.
>>>
>>> The perfective/imperfective thing is for actions, not states. You
>>> could say that states are always imperfective, or maybe better, say
>>> that the imperfective is a way of expressing an action AS a state.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> I'm wondering if there's some international disparity when it comes to the
>>>> distinction. In my experience of foreign language study, degree in
>>>> linguistics, independent research projects, etc the perfect has *always*
>>>> been considered an aspect. Perhaps this is where the confusion about
>>>> perfect vs. perfective has arisen. Do some schools of thought consider
>>>> them differently? Or do some schools of thought use the terms differently?
>>>>
>>>> English, speaking with my Syntactic-Theory-hat on, has only two tenses:
>>>> the past and non-past. Speaking with my Spanish-student-hat on, the
>>>> perfect and continuative/progressive are treated separately as they are
>>>> aspects, not tenses.
>>>>
>>>> I might see if I still have the references I was given by lecturers,
>>>> although that might involve a trip to the John Rylands and I haven't got
>>>> my new bus pass yet :)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sam Stutter
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> "No e na il cu barri"
>>>>
>>>> On 15 Jan 2012, at 12:50, Peter Cyrus wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> You could make a good argument that perfect is an aspect, but it's
>>>>> usually called a tense.
>>>>>
>>>>> Perfective and Imperfective are the two basic aspects, and we have
>>>>> them in English, too. The perfective aspect regards an action as an
>>>>> indivisible unit, a point in time. The imperfective aspect regards an
>>>>> action as a process, with duration. So "I read the book a week ago"
>>>>> is perfective, and "I read the book in bed" is imperfective. The
>>>>> first describes the result, the second the process.
>>>>>
>>>>> Some English verbs, like "search", are only imperfective. Some, like
>>>>> "find" are only perfective. You can't say "I found the book for an
>>>>> hour", and you can't say "All of a sudden, I searched".
>
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
4l. Re: Verbs for Aspects
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:56 am ((PST))
--- On Sun, 1/15/12, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
> In J15, I plan to derive the aspect suffixes (where the aspect isn't
> implied by the action type) from grammaticalized verbs. The problem is,
> I don't know what verbs to use in some cases, specifically:
>
> progressive
run: She run walk now; They always run complain.
> habitual
make: She make walk every day.
> perfect (distinct from perfective)
done: She done walk now.
> semelfactive
fast (<fasten): I fast close the door. (...aint no one go open it now.)
try: I try read that book, but I make run sleep in every page (...but
she done read it twice).
I'm sure other possibilities abound.
> So, I'm looking for suggestions.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (12)
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