European Languages and Scoring on the SAE Phonology Test

[brandrinn]

Serious question: How many languages would have a future tense if we insisted that the future tense convey absolutely zero modal or aspectual information?

[Radagast revived]

Yes, he does. "The three-tense system of SAE verbs colors all our thinking about time." (LTR p. 143) And the rest of the passage makes it clear that he is not confusing tense with time, as his purpose is precisely to distinguish them.

English doesn't have a future tense. It has several modal constructions that indicate future time among other things. Whorf's view of "SAE" verbs is very old-fashioned, with little apparent awareness of how aspect and modality work across languages, or even how much variation there is within Europe.

I disagree with that interpretation of what Whorf is saying, so does Penny Lee and other Whorfian scholars. Whorf is not readable by picking quotes like that, every statement has to be read in context. That same passage you cite goes on to discuss quite lucidly how he is talking about conceptualization of time as a row divided by the present into past and future. Also HE say SAE has a three tense system, not that English does - and then he says that it colors our thinking. That does not mean that English has a grammatical future tense, since he has started out by defining SAE languages as being generally similarin regards to how time is conceived not as to how it is grammaticalized (p. 138). The point is that English has a concept of future that corresponds to the concept in other SAE languages that also have grammatical future tenses and count days, months, seasons etc.

Even so it is odd to accuse him of having little awareness about how "aspect and modality work across languages" since nobody had idea about that when he was writing. He wasn't an indo-europeanist like Sapir, but he certainly was familiar with Indo-European languages.Constructions with will is pretty much exactly as much of a future as any other future tense I know of, even though it has a partly volitional meaning (in some contexts). "It will rain tomorrow" doesn't for example. I don't know of any romance languages (perhaps Latin exempt) that have future tenses that are not also exploited modally. My own language Danish is a better counter example since we actually use the same form as the present for future giving a formal division similar to the one in Hopi (which groups past and present (realis) against irrealis/future) - but even so we still have a future as a covert category.

Whorf also doesn't intend to construct SAE (from which he x cludes Balto-Slavic and non-IE languags) as a homogenous category except as it relates to the traits he compare, namely the tendency to conceptualize time as countable units grammaticalized in the same way as physical objects.

[Radagast revived]

Serious question: How many languages would have a future tense if we insisted that the future tense convey absolutely zero modal or aspectual information?

How many languages would even have tense if we did that?

[zompist]

Serious question: How many languages would have a future tense if we insisted that the future tense convey absolutely zero modal or aspectual information?

No one is insisting anything of the sort.

A tense is a morphological form whose prototypical meaning relates to time. Not coincidentally, a good example of a language with a future tense is Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian are also good examples, though their futures don't derive from Latin's.

Loosely, people use "tense" to mean "any verb form" or even "any verbal construction", but linguists and conlangers should do better.

You have to look at the whole system. English has morphological forms for past and present. Then it has an array of modal auxiliaries-- may, might, can, could, would, will. "Will" behaves morphologically and syntactically like these, and this is inherently a modal system, not a tense system.

And then of course there's other types of constructions, including "be going to". Singling out either "will" or "going to" as a "future tense" seriously misrepresents the structure of English and obscures how different it is from Latin. Nor is it obvious that the prototypical meaning of either construction is futurity. (There's a discussion elsewhere in L&L where I looked at a bunch of actual uses of "will" and "going to"; only a minority were simple claims about future events.)

[Vuvuzela]

(There's a discussion elsewhere in L&L where I looked at a bunch of actual uses of "will" and "going to"; only a minority were simple claims about future events.)

Here

[zompist]

Yes, he does. "The three-tense system of SAE verbs colors all our thinking about time." (LTR p. 143) And the rest of the passage makes it clear that he is not confusing tense with time, as his purpose is precisely to distinguish them.

I disagree with that interpretation of what Whorf is saying, so does Penny Lee and other Whorfian scholars. Whorf is not readable by picking quotes like that, every statement has to be read in context. That same passage you cite goes on to discuss quite lucidly how he is talking about conceptualization of time as a row divided by the present into past and future. Also HE say SAE has a three tense system, not that English does - and then he says that it colors our thinking. That does not mean that English has a grammatical future tense, since he has started out by defining SAE languages as being generally similarin regards to how time is conceived not as to how it is grammaticalized (p. 138). The point is that English has a concept of future that corresponds to the concept in other SAE languages that also have grammatical future tenses and count days, months, seasons etc.

I think you're confusing grammar and thought here. "English has a concept of future..." : no, it doesn't. English is a language and doesn't even have a morphological future. That English speakers have this concept is 1) a different idea, and 2) precisely the object of contention here.

Whorf wants to make a big metaphysical deal out of how bits of morphosyntax "color our thinking", but then he's completely sloppy about what our morphosyntax is. If you want to derive our thinking from our verbs, then at least get the details right of how the verbs work; it's simply not true that English has "past tense, present tense, future tense" that neatly corresponds to a supposed past/present/future conceptualization. If grammaticalization does affect our thought systems, then the difference in grammaticalization between Latin and English should matter.

Even so it is odd to accuse him of having little awareness about how "aspect and modality work across languages" since nobody had idea about that when he was writing.

Of course, that's the point! He was writing in 1939. It'd be sad if we'd learned nothing in 70 years. Books can be historically important, and even ahead of their time, and yet still need to be read with caveats based on later knowledge.

[brandrinn]

So English doesn't have a future tense because the future tense is historically derived from a modal? That seems kind of... wrong.

[zompist]

So English doesn't have a future tense because the future tense is historically derived from a modal? That seems kind of... wrong.

When I define a term, and then you continue to misinterpret my words as if they meant something I specifically warned against, it's hard to believe you really want a discussion.

[brandrinn]

You said this:

You have to look at the whole system. English has morphological forms for past and present. Then it has an array of modal auxiliaries-- may, might, can, could, would, will. "Will" behaves morphologically and syntactically like these, and this is inherently a modal system, not a tense system.

You said right there that "will" is not tense because it still retains the morphological and syntactic behavior of a modal verb. How is repeating your words "misinterpreting" them? Something can be a tense even if it historically came from something that was not tense. That kind of thing happens all the time.

[clawgrip]

I think he's complaining about this part:

So English doesn't have a future tense because the future tense is historically derived from a modal? That seems kind of... wrong.

Since his position is that there is no future tense derived from a modal, and that it actually still is a modal.

So my question is, since the argument is whether his assertion that SAE "grammaticalizes past/present/future" is false based on the lack of a future tense in English, why is a morphological future tense considered grammaticalized, but a modal future such as "will" not considered grammaticalized?

[zompist]

So my question is, since the argument is whether his assertion that SAE "grammaticalizes past/present/future" is false based on the lack of a future tense in English, why is a morphological future tense considered grammaticalized, but a modal future such as "will" not considered grammaticalized?

A much better question. But I didn't say that futurity is not grammaticalized at all. The simple future is a sense, but not even the most common sense, of both "will" and "be going to". The most common sense I found was that of a promise.

And once you get past tense and into verbal constructions referring in some way to time, like"going to", it becomes awfully hard to maintain that these are somehow characteristic of "SAE" and not, say, Hopi.

The future-tense thing isn't an isolated example. In another essay Whorf enthuses over Chichewa, which "has two past tenses, one for past events with present result or influence, one for past without present influence" (p. 265). A neat idea, right? Only this is precisely the concept Comrie calls the Perfect, and one of his primary examples is... English.

Or, a page before, he's enthusiastic about Japanese and its "two subjects", without noting that topicalization is something that also exists in English. It's great that Whorf introduced many people to some linguistic concepts that were not generally known; it just bugs me that he over-exoticizes them, and makes too many sloppy assumptions about "SAE".

[clawgrip]

So your reason for excluding modal and periphrastic futures in English as tenses is that while past tense in English simply refers to past events as objective facts with no other additional meaning, every possible way of indicating future in English includes with it some sort of indication of either why we believe or expect that event (inherent knowledge, a promise, a prediction, an inference or deduction, etc.), or how likely we believe it to be; since English has no way of indicating future entirely objectively, it is not the same as the present and past tenses.

[zompist]

So your reason for excluding modal and periphrastic futures in English as tenses is that while past tense in English simply refers to past events as objective facts with no other additional meaning, every possible way of indicating future in English includes with it some sort of indication of either why we believe or expect that event (inherent knowledge, a promise, a prediction, an inference or deduction, etc.), or how likely we believe it to be; since English has no way of indicating future entirely objectively, it is not the same as the present and past tenses.

No-- this is why I gave a definition. Recall that I said "tense" is not just a word meaning "construction"; if we mean constructions we should say constructions. I'm restricting "tense" to morphological indications of time-- just past and present in English.

Whorf's statements about SAE aren't upheld if we just find any old construction that happens to refer to time-- because what he was contrasting "SAE" with, Hopi, also has constructions referring to time.

Try looking at English like an alien who's never had "future tense" thrown at them in school. How does the English verb really work?

* Inflectional categories: number and person (barely); two tenses, past and present; a couple participles; a simple form.
* A closed set of modal verbs which all work about the same way.
* Ways of combining the latter with auxiliaries 'have' or 'be' (with the two different participles), plus negatives
* And an indefinite number of more complicated syntactic constructions, including "be going to"

Describing this as a "three-tense system" is just ignoring the way English morphosyntax works, out of a preconceived notion of how Europeans think.

If Whorf was given this description and told that it came from a tribe in Papua New Guinea, would he immediately decide it was a three-tense SAE system? He'd probably marvel at how it got rid of the pesky European notion of a "future" that works just like the past, instead making a series of admirably precise distinctions focused on probability, deduction, intention, and permission.

Cross-linguistically, it's not surprising that the English future is kind of weird. The future, conceptually, isn't the same as the past. Many languages refer to it with some sort of irrealis.

[Bob Johnson]

So English doesn't have a future tense because the future tense is historically derived from a modal? That seems kind of... wrong.

When I define a term, and then you continue to misinterpret my words as if they meant something I specifically warned against, it's hard to believe you really want a discussion.

if you define it as something that doesn't exist, in order to show that it doesn't exist, don't be surprised when people complain about your definition

[zompist]

So English doesn't have a future tense because the future tense is historically derived from a modal? That seems kind of... wrong.

When I define a term, and then you continue to misinterpret my words as if they meant something I specifically warned against, it's hard to believe you really want a discussion.

if you define it as something that doesn't exist, in order to show that it doesn't exist, don't be surprised when people complain about your definition

That'd be a lot cleverer if it had some vague relation to reality. No one else has offered a different definition of tense, much less argued for it.

[clawgrip]

So if I have it correct:

The modal "will" should not be considered a true future tense because:
-its morphosyntax is formally different from the past tense, but formally similar to other modals which are unrelated to time;
-it does not indicate simple time like past tense does, but instead carries additional modal information;
-it can be replaced by other constructions that also indicate the future, but with different modal information, something which does not occur for past tense.

[Radius Solis]

That'd be a lot cleverer if it had some vague relation to reality. No one else has offered a different definition of tense, much less argued for it.

Then let me do so. The other approach is that of considering grammatical operations rather than just morphology. (And of course by this I do not mean "constructions", as there are always tons of constructions that do not mark a particular grammatical operation.) I'm under the impression this is simply taken for granted by many of us on the board, perhaps a direct result of so many having read Describing Morphosyntax. Payne takes the approach of separating grammatical categories from the operations that mark them - i.e. a category like "tense" or "evidentiality" in any given language need not be marked by only one type of operator. So, for instance, a hypothetical language might be described as having nine grammatical aspects - two marked by suffixes, one by a prefix, one by a combination of prefix and suffix, one by a VP-level clitic, and the other four by means of auxiliary verbs. Or whatever mix you might imagine. And that would be considered it's aspect system, despite all the diversity of means by which it is marked.

And the argument for why this is valuable? 1. Because it better accommodates the reality that many languages have sets of morphologically-dissimilar grammatical operations that nevertheless act as sets, forming reasonably tidy grammatical categories, when taken as a whole. 2. Because it keeps us from confusing form with function. 3. Because it nicely accomodates functions that don't have an associated form, such as zero operators and disfixes; which can be grammatically critical in some languages and may be totally missed by the sort of field description workers who think it sufficient to list morphology and then say what each affix does, who apparently still exist. And 4. because it frees us from crap like having arguments about whether the English genitive and dative can be "cases" despite being marked by a clitic and a preposition respectively - under this approach, that sort of thing is simply deleted from the definition of "case", allowing us to talk about all sorts of case systems as "case systems" that don't look like classic IE ones but nevertheless clearly cover the same function types.

So to offer a specific definition of "tense", one that is a) consistent with other posts above and b) best represents what I normally understand when I hear the word in a linguistics context, it would be: a grammatical operation marking temporal deixis.


Whether I'd call "will" a "tense" is another matter, if, as you suggest, a majority of its uses do not appear to have any deictic function. That would be the crux of the argument to me.

[Radagast revived]

Yes, he does. "The three-tense system of SAE verbs colors all our thinking about time." (LTR p. 143) And the rest of the passage makes it clear that he is not confusing tense with time, as his purpose is precisely to distinguish them.

I disagree with that interpretation of what Whorf is saying, so does Penny Lee and other Whorfian scholars. Whorf is not readable by picking quotes like that, every statement has to be read in context. That same passage you cite goes on to discuss quite lucidly how he is talking about conceptualization of time as a row divided by the present into past and future. Also HE say SAE has a three tense system, not that English does - and then he says that it colors our thinking. That does not mean that English has a grammatical future tense, since he has started out by defining SAE languages as being generally similarin regards to how time is conceived not as to how it is grammaticalized (p. 138). The point is that English has a concept of future that corresponds to the concept in other SAE languages that also have grammatical future tenses and count days, months, seasons etc.

I think you're confusing grammar and thought here. "English has a concept of future..." : no, it doesn't. English is a language and doesn't even have a morphological future. That English speakers have this concept is 1) a different idea, and 2) precisely the object of contention here.

Whorf wants to make a big metaphysical deal out of how bits of morphosyntax "color our thinking", but then he's completely sloppy about what our morphosyntax is. If you want to derive our thinking from our verbs, then at least get the details right of how the verbs work; it's simply not true that English has "past tense, present tense, future tense" that neatly corresponds to a supposed past/present/future conceptualization. If grammaticalization does affect our thought systems, then the difference in grammaticalization between Latin and English should matter.

I am not confusing grammar and thought - you might say that I confuse grammar and semantics, but in fact I just don't consider them distinct. "Future" is a word in the English language, therfore the English language has a concept of "future". Speakers use that concept in speaking and thinking. Hopi does not have a word that means "future", and they also according to Whorf do not have the concept. Neither language have a morphological category of future although English clearly (despite what you say) does have a grammatical category of future which is expressed periphrastically. Malotki argues that Hopi has a grammatical future, (the irrealis), but Whorf's point is exactly that it is not a future, because it doesn't refer to the concept of future, because they haven't got that concept. English speakers however can refer to the concept of future without having a dedicated morphological category for it. This distinction between covert and overt categories is basic to Whorf's thinking. The problem is that when he uses the word tense, you take that as meaning "overt morphological inflection of tempus" - but that is not what he is talking about - for Whorf tense is a semantic category, not a morphological one.

Even so it is odd to accuse him of having little awareness about how "aspect and modality work across languages" since nobody had idea about that when he was writing.

Of course, that's the point! He was writing in 1939. It'd be sad if we'd learned nothing in 70 years. Books can be historically important, and even ahead of their time, and yet still need to be read with caveats based on later knowledge.[/quote]

One thing is reading a book with caveats - I have nowhere argued that Whorf was right in everything he wrote (his esoteric writings about Mayan glyphs are pretty appalling for example) - but I do take issue when people refuse to try and actually understand what he meant to say, but rather choose to disagree and then read him as saying something it is easy to disagree with, or when they make it an issue that he was ignorant of stuff that everyone in his time were ignorant about. Thats anachronistic and an unfair way to treat one of linguistic's most creative minds.

[Salmoneus]

Radius is right, although I'd quibble with his definition. It applies to absolute tense, but I'm not sure whether pure relative tenses can really be considered deictic - they seem to me to indicate anaphoric temporal relations, rather than deictic ones.Though there can also be mixed systems, like a system that has a secondary layer of relative tense modifying an underlying absolute (ie deictic) tense, or one that uses relative tenses but allows those tenses to act like absolute tenses in the absence of context that suggests otherwise.

[Radius Solis]

Ah, I forgot about non-deictic tenses. Apparently there exist languages which have them, but I'm not really clear on how they work. I have rarely run into any mention of a language having such - all I can think of right now is Dravidian. On the other hand, with regard to English it's moot unless someone is claiming we have non-deictic tenses too.

[zompist]

Then let me do so. The other approach is that of considering grammatical operations rather than just morphology. (And of course by this I do not mean "constructions", as there are always tons of constructions that do not mark a particular grammatical operation.) I'm under the impression this is simply taken for granted by many of us on the board, perhaps a direct result of so many having read Describing Morphosyntax. Payne takes the approach of separating grammatical categories from the operations that mark them - i.e. a category like "tense" or "evidentiality" in any given language need not be marked by only one type of operator. So, for instance, a hypothetical language might be described as having nine grammatical aspects - two marked by suffixes, one by a prefix, one by a combination of prefix and suffix, one by a VP-level clitic, and the other four by means of auxiliary verbs. Or whatever mix you might imagine. And that would be considered it's aspect system, despite all the diversity of means by which it is marked.

And the argument for why this is valuable? 1. Because it better accommodates the reality that many languages have sets of morphologically-dissimilar grammatical operations that nevertheless act as sets, forming reasonably tidy grammatical categories, when taken as a whole. 2. Because it keeps us from confusing form with function. 3. Because it nicely accomodates functions that don't have an associated form, such as zero operators and disfixes; which can be grammatically critical in some languages and may be totally missed by the sort of field description workers who think it sufficient to list morphology and then say what each affix does, who apparently still exist. And 4. because it frees us from crap like having arguments about whether the English genitive and dative can be "cases" despite being marked by a clitic and a preposition respectively - under this approach, that sort of thing is simply deleted from the definition of "case", allowing us to talk about all sorts of case systems as "case systems" that don't look like classic IE ones but nevertheless clearly cover the same function types.

So to offer a specific definition of "tense", one that is a) consistent with other posts above and b) best represents what I normally understand when I hear the word in a linguistics context, it would be: a grammatical operation marking temporal deixis.

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.

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. We need words for the categories of an inflectional system— e.g. we want to count the cases or tenses in Latin. It's useful to talk about "a case" in Latin or Russian or Quechua; it's also useful to distinguish e.g. "a mood" from "a modal" as Palmer does. That is, "a mood" such as irrealis is a way languages implement the category of Mood. It's similarly useful to distinguish the "tenses" of a verbal paradigm, separately from any other grammatical reference to time.

In terms of the current discussion, this point of view is covered under what I've said about constructions. If any construction relating to the future is a "future tense", then very likely all languages have one; Hopi certainly does.

Whether I'd call "will" a "tense" is another matter, if, as you suggest, a majority of its uses do not appear to have any deictic function. That would be the crux of the argument to me.

Here I agree. Does the structure of English support Whorf's notion of a "three-tense system of SAE verbs"?

For interpreting Whorf, the question of course is what he thought a tense was. Obviously he was not referring to Payne. Radagast has offered an interpretation— he was referring to semantic concepts— but from Whorf's actual uses of the term, I think this is wrong. Whorf is quite happy to count grammatical tenses; e.g. he discusses a hypothetical two-tense system composed of "earlier" and "later", and elsewhere he describes the Chichewa perfect/imperfect as two past tenses.

The essence of my complaint with Whorf here is that when he looks at non-English languages, he assumes that any grammatical distinction reflects some fascinating cultural concept. But he doesn't treat English this way; he doesn't look at the structure of the English verb at all, much less deduce English speakers' concepts from it. He just asserts that "SAE" is past/present/future and doesn't bother to see if the language actually works this way. He doesn't seem to notice that English and Latin treat time differently, much less consider what that means for the validity of "SAE".

The problem is that when he uses the word tense, you take that as meaning "overt morphological inflection of tempus" - but that is not what he is talking about - for Whorf tense is a semantic category, not a morphological one.

So you're a historical telepath? Look, maybe you want Whorf to have meant that, but that's not what he said, and Whorf was perfectly capable of distinguishing morphology and semantics. Take a line a page further on from the infamous SAE tense quote:

"In English the present tense seems the one least in harmony with the paramount temporal relation."

Your interpretation makes nonsense of this clear, and correct, observation. Whorf is using tense like a rational linguist: to refer to a morphological category of English. He's contrasting it with the concept of the present and pointing out, correctly, that we use the present (morphological) tense for uses beyond the (conceptual) present time.

[Salmoneus]

Ah, I forgot about non-deictic tenses. Apparently there exist languages which have them, but I'm not really clear on how they work. I have rarely run into any mention of a language having such - all I can think of right now is Dravidian. On the other hand, with regard to English it's moot unless someone is claiming we have non-deictic tenses too.

We arguably have non-deictic secondary tenses, yes. I had, I have, I will have - yes they're perfects, but part of the purpose of perfects in English is to act as anteriors when required. If you're writing a story in the past tense, for instance, you'll end up using 'I had' not only where the perfect would be used in the present, but also where the past would be used in the present - there is only one past anterior, compared to the two present anteriors, so the perfect/nonperfect distinction is collapsed (and the present 'perfect' can also be used primarily for its anterior sense on many occasions).

Likewise the 'be going to' construction - yes, it has a prospective aspect use as well, but it's also used as a posterior, which can be applied to any of the other tenses, include the relative anterior.

[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.]

In the sentence, for instance, "I was indeed eating fish that day - I had eaten cabbage the day before, and I was going to eat it again the next day, but on that particular day I was eating fish", the two constructions are clearly being used as relative tenses. There is no implication of perfect-ish relevence for the anterior (eg if this were in the present it would probably be "I ate cabbage yesterday", rather than "I have eaten cabbage yesterday" (which I'm not sure is even legal)), and no clear aspectual sense for the posterior (I'm not saying i'm planning to eat cabbage, or about to eat cabbage, only that it will happen) - the tense is what those constructions are there for.

[clawgrip]

"I have eaten cabbage yesterday" (which I'm not sure is even legal))

Not legal...we never used present perfect with past meaning.

[Yng]

[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.

[Travis B.]

[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.

Strictly speaking, would is the preterite and subjunctive of will...