Re: Locating a Sentence's Action in Time Rob Zook Mon, 05 Oct 1998 16:22:42 -0500 Saul Epstein wrote: > > Quotes From: Rob Zook > Date: Monday, October 05, 1998 12:42 PM > >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. Well, I don't think it will be that simple in most cases. In English a lot of the grammatical structure of a sentence only become obvious looking at the entire sentence. "In" by itself can mean a number of things - there is no just plain simple "in". The word "in" has at least 10 different meanings, most of which are only apparent by the context. I mean specifically that even the meaning "within the limits or bounds of" seems too ambiguous without reference to time, space, or no-space. But perhaps I'm just being overly picky here. I mean knowing that "blood in a le matya" tells me very little useful meaningful information. Is it the le matya's blood, or did the le matya eat the blood? It's too fuzzy. > >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.) Something is going on here that's really unclear to me. You keep saying, "yes, but I don't understand". That seems really confusing. I'm saying that there may be no simple way to translate this into English. However, that does not mean that in Vulcan there is no semantic difference. The overlap of the interval of the action with the tense moment, and the relationship of a particular point in time in the action, and either the tense moment or some other temporal referent seem like two staggeringly different things to me. Now are you saying what I see as a staggering difference you see as not significant? > >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... Oh, of course. For most part I think one or the other, either concurrency or "phase" would suffice. But at last one of them seems necessary to get beyond baby talk. But for just baby talk tense seems all that's necessary. So perhaps we should mention both in the introductory text, but not mention how they work when mixed? For example, one Vulcan might say to the other: "When did you talk about quantum physics in your physics lecture yesterday?" Then the response might be "At the beginning of my lecture", in which case the most precise and yet still simple response might be "initiation phase in my past speech". Although unless Spock was the very pedantically atypical Vulcan in his spatial and temporal references, an adult Vulcan would even more likely respond with something like: "10 minutes 20,4 seconds into my 120 minute lecture". While if the Vulcan was asked how long did he speak about quantum physics he might say, the "beginning interval of my past speech". So even with all this, I still think we're going to be talking in baby Vulcan until we can specify even more precisely events in time and space. We have to keep in mind that your average Vulcan likely has the equivalent to a doctorate in the philosophy of science, and several bachlorates in specific sciences, arts and/or engineering technologies. The difference I see hinges on this: what is being related to the tense moment, an instantaneous point in time ("phase") or an interval of time (concurrency)? At least that's what your diagram indicates to me. That concurrency speaks of how intervals of time overlap with the interval of the tense moment. While what I called the event aspect and you suggested we call "phase", refers to specific instantaneous points in an action regardless of their relationship to the tense moment (the entire set of these points is what lojban refers to as the contour of an event). > >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. Maybe I should rephrase that, can you give me a "text book example" definition of "tense moment"? I not really sure I understand what you mean. Rob Z.