back to the future

[David Gil]

For me the most annoying thing about this nonsense is that it does a 
discredit to serious -- albeit controversial and also oft-riduculed -- 
work that is being done on the effect that language might have on 
cognition, eg. Lera Boroditsky's solid scientific experiments showing 
that the presence or absence of grammatical TAM marking does have an 
effect on how we conceptualize time.

On 26/02/2013 17:29, Scott Delancey wrote:
>
> The most annoying thing about this nonsense is that English is /not/ a 
> "strong FTR" language:
>
> "If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't 
> attend a meeting later today, I could not say 'I go to a seminar', 
> English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have 
> to go to a seminar'."
>
> First, of course we regularly use the simple present for future 
> reference: /I fly to New York on Friday/.  Second, neither /I am 
> going/ nor /I have to go/ is in any way a future construction. Neither 
> is /I will go to a seminar/, which is modal, not tense, but we can let 
> that go, because, in the context indicated here it is quite 
> impossible. In certain contexts one could say /I'm going to go .../, 
> which is a real future construction. But it simply is not obligatory 
> in English to use any kind of future construction here --the most 
> natural way to say this is with the *present* progressive:/I am going 
> to a seminar/.
>
> On 2013-02-26 7:54, Nigel Vincent wrote:
>
>> At Frans' prompting I post this piece of nonsense for typological (or 
>> indeed other!) comment:
>>
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574
>>
>> Nigel
>>
>>
>> Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
>> Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
>> The University of Manchester
>>
>> Vice-President for Research & HE Policy, The British Academy
>> Linguistics & English Language
>> School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
>> The University of Manchester
>> Manchester M13 9PL
>> UK
>> http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/nigel-vincent/

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/


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