Re: Locating a Sentence's Action in Time Saul Epstein Mon, 5 Oct 1998 14:26:21 -0500 Quotes From: Rob Zook Date: Monday, October 05, 1998 12:42 PM >Saul Epstein wrote: > >> Mm-hmm. About the terminology: I've decided the traditional just gets >> in the way of people understanding, unless they happen to be familiar >> with it already. So I'm developing new terminology that I hope seems >> better motivated. > >Well, ok, I'll certainly buy that as I know it confused me, at least >until you explained it to me. However, what differences does it make >if someone new has to learn traditional terminology or your new >terminology? Eh, well, my hope is that the new terminology will be far more "transparent" as is so often said among technofolk. That is, by choosing terms with an eye for broader, contemporary usage, I hope that understanding will be possible with less explanation. >> >Why truncate the original meaning of -zo-? >> >> Because the meaning you meant is covered by what I'd now call >> continuous concurrence: action begins before the tense and not ended >> within the tense (at least "so far," in the case of the present). If >> you think that matches -zo- better, that's what we can use for it. > >Ok, well in that case I do think that ZC -zo- probably does match >your continuous better than the final. Check. >> If you mean it can't be told >> what the nature of the action's location is, that's what I saw as the >> role of the "relationship specifiers" you mentioned a while back. >> (E,g., -he is location in general, but there are lots of extra words >> analogous to prepositions that specify kinds of location. Maybe Phase >> serves much the same purpose? So, > 'a-khe-nkh-he surak>?) > >In the case of entity words, yes, I think that the -he should not be >used without some other aspectral word which indications the nature of >the location, using an phase or continuum word would indicate it was >a temporal location, while using a spatial prepositional word would >indicate the location was spatial. > >Otherwise, as beneficial as ambiguity may be in some instances, a >a word with -he seems too ambiguous. Of course. Unless you just mean "in," which happens often enough. >> No, that's probably OK, after all. I cede -cu-, and if it's all right >> to understand Phase as serving a roughly prepositional function, your >> sentence suddenly makes perfect sense... > >Roughly prepositional, yes. I don't think that prepositions are the >most efficient or effective way of indicating information about temporal >and spatial events. Sure, I was just comparing the function. >So the point in time when the speaking began occurred within the >time when the kahs'wan occurred. Regardless of how the interval of time >of the speaking or the kahs'wan event overlaps with the tense moment. Yes. I still don't see the, uh, semantic difference. When translated into English, the initiation moment of the speech can come out as a noun or a verb. The tense of the sentence is independent from the concurrence of the action thereto, and from any referred-to phase of any of the participant entities. (Excluding, in normal circumstances, any combinations that would defy time.) >We could add some concurrencies to both the action and the temporal >reference entity and say: > >lihe th'prazoshila spokhi th'kahszocuwanhe > >This would be even more difficult to translate into English: > >"in the past, the initiation of my speaking to spock (which began > before now and ended before now) occurred during my kahs'wan (which >began and ended before now)." > >Now the "occurred during" comes from the aspects -zo- and -cu- >and locative -he occurring on the entity word kahs'wan. Beautiful! And I mean that. I very much want to avoid getting so complicated in an introductory grammar... >> In other words, Final locates the end of an action within a tense >> without determining the beginning of the action. Initial locates the >> beginning of an action within a tense without determining the end of >> the action. Complete and Continuous locate the beginning and end of an >> action, within or beyond a tense respectively. Indeterminate locates >> the action but neither beginning nor end. It may be that this should >> be the "default" concurrence. > >What about if the action begins and ends entirely before the tense >moment? Can such a thing even happen? Of course. One has two options. If the action ends just a while before the tense, Final concurrence is appropriate. If the action ends more than a while before the tense, it's really more appropriate to shift the tense of the sentence backward, and choose a new concurrence to match. At a press conference, someone might be asked questions on a particular topic. At a certain point, she might say in response to additional questions, "I have said all I'm going to say on that topic." The questions might move on to other topics. Then a question on the declared-finished topic might be asked again. The speaker might say again, "I have said all I'm going to say on that topic." The past-ward boundary of the present tense has, in a sense, receded from the speech moment as the speech moment has proceeded toward the future-ward boundary. So long as this can be sensibly maintained, such a sentence can remain in the present tense while the action itself has final concurrence with that tense. Later in the day, or the next day, or a week later, the speaker might respond to an interviewer's question by saying, "I said all I'm going to say on that topic at last week's press conference." Since the present tense itself has now moved on, the action in question no longer has final concurrence with it, and can be referred to in the past tense. (This example attempts to get the idea across. Many English speakers will know, quite accurately, that English allows more flexibility than this, because our system for expressing concurrence is actually more complicated. This is about the best I can do without drifting into an involved discussion of English, much of which would be speculation...) >How does one define the boundaries >of the tense moment? Contextually. Tense is fluid and imprecise, which is largely why Concurrence exists. Vulcan is more precise than English, since it has more tenses. But from one sentence to the next, present may mean "right now," or "today," or "this year." Past and Future, potentially extending ad infinitum in their respective directions, are even less exact. -- from Saul Epstein locus*planetkc,com - www,planetkc,com/locus "Surakri' ow'phacur the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pharka the's'hi surakecha'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at