TED talk: how a language's grammar affects economic behavior

[linguoboy]

No one commands people to do things at the exact moment of utterance

Stop it already.

[Vuvuzela]

No one commands people to do things at the exact moment of utterance

Stop it already.

Hyperbole.

[zompist]

Vuvuzela, I think you're confusing referring to the future with having a future tense.

It's not an interesting fact about a language that it can refer to things in the future. All languages can do that.

What's interesting— and relevant to Chen's idea— is how much it's grammaticalized.

Chen takes this as a binary, though, and this is just wrong. English grammaticalizes past/non-past (and even that has holes, as Sal points out). Future is indicated by a whole bunch of things (most of which are optional) and is almost always tied up with mode. Plus, it's really not that far from German even though Chen places the two on opposite sides of a bright line.

[Hallow XIII]

Yes, indeedy. Like English, German can and will make statements about the future in the present tense, and like English, German must indicate the future by means of an auxiliary verb. This is more or less a feature of every Germanic language, what with English and the Scandinavian languages (except maybe for Icelandic, I'm not sure) even doing that with their conditional tense, which leads to speakers of such languages making interesting mistakes in other languages where they will consistently overuse the present in cases where the other language would require the future.

[Vuvuzela]

Vuvuzela, I think you're confusing referring to the future with having a future tense.

I was referring to grammatical structures that almost always refer to the future. Command forms and expressions of hope are inherently in the future, although the former could be viewed as more content then grammar. Therefore, even a language whose grammar must describe future/present distinctions unambiguously could have unmarked command forms.
Although, now that I look at it, the simple present seems to work equally well for gnomic expressions as it does a predictive future, so I'd also call that example valid.

[zompist]

Vuvuzela, I think you're confusing referring to the future with having a future tense.

I was referring to grammatical structures that almost always refer to the future. Command forms and expressions of hope are inherently in the future, although the former could be viewed as more content then grammar.

In what way is futurity grammaticalized in imperatives? It's the same form whether you order someone to do something immediately ("Go!") or later on ("Write a report on Taoism").

You could say that due to the nature of the world, a command can't be executed until some time in the future-- i.e. after it's been heard. But that's precisely not a fact about language (and really it seems to miss the point of what future tenses are actually used for).

As for the rest, I hope you don't think that verbs of desire always refers to the future.

[linguoboy]

This mentions a future time, which wouldn't make it a bad example on it's own, but let's take it away; "My flight leaves." seems like an awkward present tense construction to me.

I guess it depends what context you're imagining for it. Try this one:

"As long as you finish it before five p.m. tomorrow."
"Why? What happens then?"
"My flight leaves."

Still "awkward"?

[Vuvuzela]

This mentions a future time, which wouldn't make it a bad example on it's own, but let's take it away; "My flight leaves." seems like an awkward present tense construction to me.

I guess it depends what context you're imagining for it. Try this one:

"As long as you finish it before five p.m. tomorrow."
"Why? What happens then?"
"My flight leaves."

Still "awkward"?

The time of reference is still future. The only time I could imagine that sentence referring to the present is if it were talking about something the happens often "My flight leaves before I get there all the time." or in one of those hip present-tense novels, neither of which I thought of when writing my original post.

[Radius Solis]

The time of reference is still future. The only time I could imagine that sentence referring to the present is if it were talking about something the happens often "My flight leaves before I get there all the time." or in one of those hip present-tense novels, neither of which I thought of when writing my original post.

That's not referring to the present either - it's like "the sky is blue", indicating something that's true generally instead of at any particular time. It would be difficult to get a true present time reference out of it without some kind of supporting time reference in the clause, but that is because we don't much use action verbs in the "simple present" with a simple-present meaning, the way we do with stative verbs. Action verbs generally need to be in the present continuous for that.

However, using action verbs in the "present" for a real present meaning is among the diuerse tricks used in writing antiquated-sounding English, and thus remains grammatical... at least in that context. I can easily picture a knight in some Arthurian romance saying "I am undone! My lifeblood flows from my very veins!" upon being mortally wounded, say. But a modern equivalent like "Oh no! My flight leaves without me!" as you run to the terminal... eh. It's not exactly wrong, but it is unidiomatic.

[clawgrip]

I guess it depends what context you're imagining for it. Try this one:

"As long as you finish it before five p.m. tomorrow."
"Why? What happens then?"
"My flight leaves."

Still "awkward"?

The time of reference is still future.

This is the exact point. Present tense referencing future, something that Chen claims is impossible in a "futured" language such as English.

"My flight leaves March 23rd,"

This mentions a future time, which wouldn't make it a bad example on it's own, but let's take it away; "My flight leaves." seems like an awkward present tense construction to me. Better to say "My flight is leaving.", which also works in your example.

He says that when we talk about the future, we must use a future tense. March 23rd is the future. Unless you're arguing that "leaves" is a future tense, or that "March 23rd" is a future tense (it's not; cf. "I left March 23rd" which is grammatical and not future), then your altered version of my sentence doesn't really prove anything except that we're likely to add a temporal phrase when context is insufficient, something he does with his "futureless" Chinese and German examples by including the word "tomorrow".

With the exception of "be going to" which I can accept as a grammaticalized future "tense", (and I'll even grant you the imperative one since it could be argued that an imperative is simply an expression of present desire), I honestly don't see your point. My examples lack any explicit future "tense".

English does not always require future forms to discuss future events. Consider how unnatural it sounds to explicitly mark future on these verbs that indicate future events:

*I'm going to be a doctor when I will grow up.
*If you will see him, say hi for me.
*I hope I will be* as healthy as you when I will be 70.

*optional here. Again, as he says, only futureless languages have optional future constructions.

You can certainly argue that they all have temporal markers (if / when), but these markers are not limited to discussing the future, so they do not support his argument.

The arguments you are making about English will disqualify every one of his "futureless" languages and disprove his whole theory; which is my point: future is not as cut and dry as sticking "will" in front of the verb, which seems to be one of the major assumptions of his theory.

[Vuvuzela]

I honestly don't see your point.

My point was, and this is a conclusion I jumped to erroneously, the syntactic structure of your examples conveyed future time. I was in fact arguing that "leaves" was, in that context, "future tensed", though that now seems silly.

[clawgrip]

Okay, I see now. I think this sort of murkiness is something that Chen didn't consider when dividing up the languages into his two neat categories.

[linguoboy]

Okay, I see now. I think this sort of murkiness is something that Chen didn't consider when dividing up the languages into his two neat categories.

As far as I can tell, Chen didn't do the dividing up himself. He simply reinterpreted the EUROTYP classification (which simply identified a certain cluster of languages as "futureless") as a binary division into "strong-FTR" and "weak-FTR" and ran with that. His response to the questions Pullum raises about the robustness of such a classification is essentially, "But look how neat the correlation is! I must be onto something!"

[Salmoneus]

Conditionals and expressions of hope are neither grammatically nor semantically future.
"I hope there hasn't been a nuclear explosion in China overnight"
"If rabbits had been introduced into Germany in the eighteenth century, Germans wouldn't have eaten as much chicken between 1870 and 1892"

Nothing futurey here.

[clawgrip]

Conditionals and expressions of hope are neither grammatically nor semantically future.
"I hope there hasn't been a nuclear explosion in China overnight"
"If rabbits had been introduced into Germany in the eighteenth century, Germans wouldn't have eaten as much chicken between 1870 and 1892"

Nothing futurey here.

That is, naturally, because you're specifically using them in sentences that are grammatically perfective.
Indeed, I said they are not limited to discussing the future. That is, of course, the point: despite not being future tense markers, they can still be used in reference to events in the future.

[Salmoneus]

I was talking to vuvuzela.

[Vuvuzela]

Conditionals and expressions of hope are neither grammatically nor semantically future.
"I hope there hasn't been a nuclear explosion in China overnight"
"If rabbits had been introduced into Germany in the eighteenth century, Germans wouldn't have eaten as much chicken between 1870 and 1892"

Nothing futurey here.

It's already been pointed out, and made cleare enough for me, that my original post was a bit silly. And my point about conditionals wasn't that they're inherently future, it was that they take the tense of whatever verb they qualify. That's also wrong, though, at least with regards to auxiliary tense-aspects:
If he's practiced as hard as he said he would, he won't face another humiliating defeat this time. (Perfect and future)
If he was ever going to change, he'd have done it by now (past posterior and past perfect)
May also be the case with "simple" morphological tenses, but I can't think of an example right now.

[Gray Richardson]

I don't believe Chen's position is really that it's impossible for "futureless" languages to require a choice regarding time when using certain words or constructions, or conversely that languages with a future tense can’t have words and constructions that are neutral in regards to time. (And if Chen did say that, he would be clearly wrong.) No language is 100% futureless or requires a choice of tense 100% of the time. In that sense, "futureless" is a misnomer and is not meant to indicate the complete absence of reference to future time. Rather, I think Chen is only asserting that the general rule for each class of languages will apply in the large majority of situations when one uses a verb.

Languages could then probably be grouped along a continuum with future tense at one pole and futureless at the other end. You could perhaps do a study and count the number of times during a recorded period that speakers use verbs and then analyze whether each use required a choice as to future tense. Based on the ratio of instances of choice to total utterances you could determine a percentage of future-parsing for each language and place them on the axis accordingly.

You wouldn’t necessarily get a bell-curve distribution. Presumably, Chen would argue that you’d get a double bell-curve—that the futureless languages and the future tense languages would congregate closer to the poles with a substantial gap in between. I think Chen would say it's that gap which contributes to the difference in observed behavior between language speakers.

Presumably, when you utter a verb that requires you to decide on a tense, there are some neurons assigned to the task of evaluating and executing the task. Based on your language—but not only your language, also your personal idiolect, topics of conversation, and even your propensity to engage in conversation—you will utter a given number of verbs and make a given number of choices regarding tense throughout the course of a day and over your lifetime. Each time you do so, those neurons fire and the associated neural pathways are strengthened, and connections are reinforced. Because future tense languages require their speakers to do this many more times in a day than futureless ones, one might hypothesize that those speakers have more robust neural architecture devoted to awareness of future time; whereas, futureless speakers might have fewer or weaker neural pathways devoted to distinguishing the present from the future. This hypothesis is perhaps testable by some means, possibly including functional MRI.

[Vuvuzela]

I don't believe Chen's position is really that it's impossible for "futureless" languages to require a choice regarding time when using certain words or constructions, or conversely that languages with a future tense can’t have words and constructions that are neutral in regards to time. (And if Chen did say that, he would be clearly wrong.)

I would guess Chen's position would be more along the lines of

2
In English future reference is possible without future markers in certain contexts: specifically with scheduled
events or events resulting from law-like properties of the world. See Copley (2009) for details. In my analysis, I set aside these cases because as shown in Dahl (1985) and Dahl (2000), “in many if not most languages, this kind of sentence is treated in a way that does not mark it grammatically as having non-present time reference... even for languages where future-time reference is otherwise highly grammaticalized.” In other words, how scheduled events
are treated does not reflect a language’s overall treatment of future reference.

Languages could then probably be grouped along a continuum with future tense at one pole and futureless at the other end. You could perhaps do a study and count the number of times during a recorded period that speakers use verbs and then analyze whether each use required a choice as to future tense. Based on the ratio of instances of choice to total utterances you could determine a percentage of future-parsing for each language and place them on the axis accordingly.

You wouldn’t necessarily get a bell-curve distribution. Presumably, Chen would argue that you’d get a double bell-curve—that the futureless languages and the future tense languages would congregate closer to the poles with a substantial gap in between. I think Chen would say it's that gap which contributes to the difference in observed behavior between language speakers.

I think Chen would say it's the:

The first way that language may affect future choices is by changing how distant future events
feel. For example, it seems plausible that speaking about future events as if they were happening
now (in the present tense), would lead weak-FTR speakers to perceive future events as less distant.

that contributes.

Presumably, when you utter a verb that requires you to decide on a tense, there are some neurons assigned to the task of evaluating and executing the task.

Presumably:

The second way that language may affect future choices is by leading speakers to have more or less precise beliefs about the timing of future rewards. Languages with more grammatical time
marking would lead speakers to hold more precise beliefs about the timing of events if either:
marking time requires increased attention to time, or if these markers are encoded in memory.
While no studies (to my knowledge) have directly examined the effects of how a language treats
time, a large literature has found that language with more precise “basic color terms”12 cause their
speakers to hold more precise color beliefs

[linguoboy]

Languages could then probably be grouped along a continuum with future tense at one pole and futureless at the other end. You could perhaps do a study and count the number of times during a recorded period that speakers use verbs and then analyze whether each use required a choice as to future tense. Based on the ratio of instances of choice to total utterances you could determine a percentage of future-parsing for each language and place them on the axis accordingly.

You could do that. But Chen didn't, and neither did the studies he derived his data from.