European Languages and Scoring on the SAE Phonology Test

[Vuvuzela]

[This is one important difference between this posterior and the will-future-tense: 'will' cannot be combined with other tenses, but 'be going to' can. You can have a past posterior, for instance ("I was going to eat"), but you can't have a past future ("I was will eat") - the future is a primary tense, not secondary.]

Although 'would' fulfils this function to some extent.

I've noticed it crop up mostly in conditional statements " He would kill you if he found out!" vs. "He will kill you if he finds out." I've also seen it used for the past habitual, as in "Every day, she would meet her friends at the bus stop, and they would walk to school." There's also the past prospective construction "would go on to"+infinitive as in "Little did he know he would go on to become king of the Evil Empire of the Western Westeria-speaking Peoples of the World."
However, I can't think of any examples of "would + infinitive" for the posterior, so I don't know.

[Radius Solis]

OK. Payne's point in general is good, but if that's what you're following, then any language is going to have "Tense". Even, say, Chinese, which is usually described as an aspect-based language— because as I'm sure you recall, Payne includes adverbials and lexical items among the ways languages can implement a feature. So words like "tomorrow" are examples of Tense.

Regardless of Payne, I limited my argument to grammatical operations. I was not talking about lexical items and it would certainly be pointless and silly to call "tomorrow" a tense. It's true he does repeatedly bring up that features found in grammar are also very often instantiated in the lexicon too, but nothing about this means that including everything having to do with time is the only alternative to including morphology alone.

Payne's approach is well suited for answering the question he's trying to address: "What do I put in the Case (/Aspect / Tense) section of my grammar?" It's not as well suited for describing morphology itself.

In terms of this discussion, I don't see where anyone but you was discussing solely morphology until you restricted the subject to that with your definition, or indeed after it either. On the other hand, I haven't read Whorf and can't comment on him, so perhaps I'm missing context to the contrary.

Also, note that our approach is hardly inconsistent with being able to discuss morphology itself with terms like "tense". Certainly it's useful to be able to discuss the tenses of a morphological paradigm! But it doesn't necessarily follow that an exhaustive list of tense suffixes is therefore an exhaustive list of tenses.

[zompist]

Payne's approach is well suited for answering the question he's trying to address: "What do I put in the Case (/Aspect / Tense) section of my grammar?" It's not as well suited for describing morphology itself.

In terms of this discussion, I don't see where anyone but you was discussing solely morphology until you restricted the subject to that with your definition, or indeed after it either.

First, I wasn't "discussing solely morphology". I was discussing the structure of the English verb, and that in turn was because Whorf's statement about "SAE" gets it wrong. If you want to be a Whorfian and look at how language structure affects thought, it's important to know what that structure is. And the "will" form is part of an array of modal forms that form a cohesive system.

Second, I'm not inventing some personal restriction for the purposes of this thread. I'm repeating a standard analysis of linguistics. The idea of English as having just two tenses goes back to at least Otto Jespersen's massive and very influential grammar. It's also the position of F.R. Palmer's A linguistic study of the English verb, Martin Joos's The English Verb, Barbara Strang's Modern English Structure, Quirk/Greenbaum/Leech/Svartvik's Grammar of Contemporary English, and Huddleston & Pullum's The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

(As a side note, of these, it'd be surprising if Whorf hadn't heard of Jespersen, who even makes an appearance in C.S.Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet as the philological equivalent of Einstein.)

You don't have to accept the idea, but you and Bob seem to imply that I'm making up something for nefarious purposes, and that's simply wrong.

[Radagast revived]

I think some issues are being confused, among them which claims Whorf made and which were made by Bboard members.

Whorf never claims that English has a future tense, he claims that SAE has a future tense - that does not mean that every Indo-European language has a grammatical future tense but that on average they tend to. So WHorf never contradicts Jespersen with whom he was obviously familiar.

I made the claim that English has a future tense, that is not a "pure" tense as the Latin one, but nonetheless part of the system of grammatical time reference.

Radius showed that such an interpretation of English tense is not incongruent with contemporary linguistic definitions of grammatical categories.

I claimed that Whorf is not talking about grammaticallly marked/morphosyntactic tense, but about conceptualization of time, when he describes SAE as characterized by a past/present/future trichotomy. That is not merely my own interpretation of Whorf (or what I would like him to mean), but also that of Penny Lee, who is the single scholar who has made the most detailed analysis of Whorf's writings. You may claim that it is what she would like him to mean, but it would be unwise to make that claim before reading her detailed analyses.

I think it is quite odd to assume that Whorf is arguing that tense only exists in as far as it is overtly inflected in a grammatical paradigm, when the title of the essay you cite is "the relation of habitual THOUGHT to language" and the entire point of the essay is to show that Hopi an SAE conceptualize time differently and that this difference is reflected in the linguistic constructions with which the speakers of those languages refer to time. It seems entirely unwarranted by the actual text to assume that Whorf thinks that conceptual structures correspond one-to-one with grammatical categories. He simply doesn't make that claim. His claim in that essay is about different concepts of time not about how many grammatical tenses are in Hopi and SAE respectively. In the article on grammatical categories, he furthermore makes it very clear that he does not consider grammatical categories to be necessarily overtly inflected, but that concepts can be covertlty embedded into language restricting language usage without any corresponding morphological elements. The examples you give of Whorf "counting" tenses is not an argument against his concept of "tense" being basically conceptual rather than morphological - the point is that the number of distinct concepts vary, not just the grammatical categories.

[zompist]

Whorf never claims that English has a future tense, he claims that SAE has a future tense - that does not mean that every Indo-European language has a grammatical future tense but that on average they tend to. So WHorf never contradicts Jespersen with whom he was obviously familiar.

True, he's talking about "SAE" in that sentence. What's unclear is why you think this improves Whorf's statement! It means that he's talking about "SAE" without a single actual example. And if by your hypothesis he would agree with Jespersen's two-tense analysis, it's rather bizarre that he fails to mention that English differs from "SAE" here.

I claimed that Whorf is not talking about grammaticallly marked/morphosyntactic tense, but about conceptualization of time, when he describes SAE as characterized by a past/present/future trichotomy.

Yes, and I showed that this interpretation makes nonsense of Whorf's own statements further on.

It seems entirely unwarranted by the actual text to assume that Whorf thinks that conceptual structures correspond one-to-one with grammatical categories.

I agree; in fact the quote I gave, the one that contradicts your interpretation, shows that Whorf perfectly well understood that grammatical and conceptual categories could differ (and that in such a case he used "tense" to refer to the morphological side).

The examples you give of Whorf "counting" tenses is not an argument against his concept of "tense" being basically conceptual rather than morphological - the point is that the number of distinct concepts vary, not just the grammatical categories.

The thing is, when it comes to exotic language, his methodology is to count the grammatical tenses (or other forms, such as Japanese 'subjects') and deduce the number of conceptual categories. I have doubts about this as a methodology, but no matter-- to be consistent, he should apply the same method to Indo-European languages. But here he applies an entirely different methodology, supplying the concepts apparently by introspection.

(FWIW, though I'm going hard on Whorf for these examples, it doesn't mean that one can't create a 'better Whorfianism'. But that should mean acknowledging where he was unclear or just wrong, not papering over these instances in other to retain his oracular status.)

[Radagast revived]

In order to know where he was wrong you have to first try to understand what he was trying to say. I acknowledge that you do that - I don't agree with your interpretations or with what you profess to have shown. I am also not trying to maintain Whorf's "oracular status" - which I think is a rather odd way of describing someone who has been consistently ridiculed by most of the past 60 years of linguistic scholarship. I may come across as "papering over" his errors, but that is because I am put in a situation where he is bing accused of making errors that I don't think he made. Now do I think that he ever formulated clear idea about what linguistic relativiy is and how to investigate it empirically? No. Do I think he was casual bordering the sloppy in his description of SAE? Yes. Do I think that he could have done a much better job of preempting obvious objections if he had been more careful in his writing style? yes. Do I think that he frequently entertained odd esoteric ideas that throw his scientific rigour into doubt? Yes. But this still does not mean that he was claiming that English has a future tense. And it also still is clear that in "The Relation of Habitual Thought to Language" he is talking about conceptualizations of time - not about the number of grammatical categories.

[Radagast revived]

Our discussion prompted me to review the literature on Hopi time and begin to write this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy. Two things stand out: 1. Whorf actually claims that Hopi does not have tense at all. He analyzes Malotki's future/non-future distinction as a distinction basically between what we would today call realis and irrealis. Reviewing Malotki's own examples I think Whorf's analysis is borne out - many of Malotki's examples (at least 20) of the future tense are in fact refferring to times before the communicative event (i.e. the past), and are basically modal. IF this analysis holds Hopi is a tenseless language in Comreie's terminology. 2. several scholars apart from Penny Lee, for example John lucy, Stephen Levinson and John Leavitt agrees with my interpretation of what Whorf was trying to say - he was saying that the Hopi conceptualization of time was different than that of SAE languages and that this could be explained by the fact that their grammar never causes them to talk about time or units of time as an objects. I don't know of any Indo-European language in which units of time are not mostly represented by (count) nouns.

Looking over the Hopi sentences in Malotkis 1983 book ostensibly refuting Whorf it strikes me that the Hopi for example does not have a noun meaning an hour, but describes the phenomena by the verbal circumlocution "when the clock has turned once", nor the concept of a day but rather the expression corresponding to "when it is light/during the day/by day" They also do not talk about days as "new" (it is just light again) or "long" (but they may say that the sun moves slowly today). Malotki's refutation of Whorf is only convincing in so far as he does show that the Hopi use spatial metaphors to refer to time as distance.

Also I've reviewed the literature on English tenses, and found that it is not an uncommon analysis to propose that the will construction is in fact a future tense. This is done in Peter Harder who wrote "Functional Semantics: A Theory of Meaning, Structure, and Tense in English", who argues against Jespersen. The analysis is also well known enough that Laura Michaelis argues against it in her chapter on tense in handbook of English linguistics.

[Melteor]

Our discussion prompted me to review the literature on Hopi time and begin to write this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy...Malotki's refutation of Whorf is only convincing in so far as he does show that the Hopi use spatial metaphors to refer to time as distance.

Well, Sanuma Yanomami supposedly has a verb form called the semitransitive that conflates distance with time. Not that weird, we do it when we can use absolutes like 'light speed' or "Texas is 42 hours away from here by car but only 4 by plane." But still, that is kind of unusual to consider grammatically identical to tense. It ignores acceleration because in the cases of a car, human, or plane we consider them to be moving at their maximum speed in relatively constrained temporal frames, hence speed variation doesn't have too big an effect on distance if you're sticking to a direction...So you can treat time and distance as roughly one magnitude on a vector.

EDIT:
Oh OK, my bad.

Tangent: This reminds me, I've alwasy wondered if there's a language out there that talks about acceleration and derivatives in more manageable terms, like "faster and fasterer." That would be cool. In my gut I feel like English makes a difference between speed "fast" and agility "quick" but it's not systematic.

[Radagast revived]

No that point is that Whorf said the Hopi didn't do that which would be weird. It is otherwise considered a universal that all languages describe time through spatial metaphors. So that is Why Malotki is making a good point in showing that the Hopi also do this.

[zompist]

Our discussion prompted me to review the literature on Hopi time and begin to write this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy. Two things stand out: 1. Whorf actually claims that Hopi does not have tense at all. He analyzes Malotki's future/non-future distinction as a distinction basically between what we would today call realis and irrealis. Reviewing Malotki's own examples I think Whorf's analysis is borne out - many of Malotki's examples (at least 20) of the future tense are in fact refferring to times before the communicative event (i.e. the past), and are basically modal. IF this analysis holds Hopi is a tenseless language in Comreie's terminology.

I have no idea who's right about Hopi; I don't know Hopi. However, I wonder why it seems so hard to just entertain the notion that Whorf might have been wrong. Malotki studied Hopi language and culture for twenty-five years; he's published extensively on Hopi ethnology and semantics; he's a major contributor to a 900-page Hopi dictionary. Do you know enough Hopi to be sure that he's wrong and Whorf is right?

he was saying that the Hopi conceptualization of time was different than that of SAE languages and that this could be explained by the fact that their grammar never causes them to talk about time or units of time as an objects. I don't know of any Indo-European language in which units of time are not mostly represented by (count) nouns.

Looking over the Hopi sentences in Malotkis 1983 book ostensibly refuting Whorf it strikes me that the Hopi for example does not have a noun meaning an hour, but describes the phenomena by the verbal circumlocution "when the clock has turned once", nor the concept of a day but rather the expression corresponding to "when it is light/during the day/by day" They also do not talk about days as "new" (it is just light again) or "long" (but they may say that the sun moves slowly today).

I don't think the dispute was about this, but never mind that. I think these examples are interesting, and in general the "more verby" nature of many Amerindian languages is fascinating.

One stumbling block I have with Whorf is that it seems to be that he's a bit led astray by poor glossing conventions. Things sound exotic, and for some of us poetic, if you treat glosses as "how people think". The Nootka say "Boiled-eaters-go-for-he-does"! It's mysterious and evocative. And the French say "It there has a table", and the Russians say "To me and of home well."

I know he's trying to get across how different languages work and inform English speakers that their verbal habits aren't universal, and that's great. And again, I can't say how the Hopi think. But I'm not sure that the absence of a short root for "hour" actually proves much. Old English didn't have the word "hour" either (it had tīd, but this was a much broader concept, anywhere from a short period to a season). Maybe we do think much more about times as objects, but this might have more to do with the invention of clocks than with IE.