just now

[Lynne Murphy]

oops--  I just sent Mark Mandel's thinig back to the list--sorry, I meant to reply
to it, as I do now:



Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote:

> I'm used to "just now" as very recent past *or* present-to-immediate-future, but
> the latter preferably with a kind of negative polarity:
>
>      Q: Could you check this paragraph over for me?
>      A1: Not just now, I'm in the middle of something.
>      A2: Soon; I'm working on a rush job just now.
>
> This "just now" almost requires *some* kind of denial or exclusion to justify
> it. Not quite, though. I think I could write to a friend, "Just now I'm trying
> to figure out how to pay for a new roof."

But i'd still contend that folks don't use "just now" in AmE with an overt future
marker.
E.g., "Just now I will answer the door."  In your examples, with the present
progressive, it means "now-ish", whereas in SAfE, it means more like "not quite
now".

I checked the Dictionary of SAfE on Historical Principles (god, I love this book)
re: what I said earlier about "now-now."  It says that "now-now" means
'immediately', not 'now', as I had claimed.  So, now-now is sooner than just now,
but not exactly "now".  The really confusing thing in SAfE is that "now" has come
to mean "just now" for a lot of people in a lot of situations.  I used to have a
great example of that from an overheard telephone conversation and now I can't
remember it, but I probably talked about it on this list years ago.

Incidentally, now-now is a calque from Afrikaans (nou-nou).  First citation for a
future tense use is 1970.  Nadine Gordimer citation in 1971.  (Immediate past sense
used in 1948--_Cry, the Beloved Country_, Alan Paton).  Just now is from general
English, but the future sense is influeced by Afrikaans "netnou."  Future tense
cites of that go back to 1900--"Go but inside, I shall follow just now."

Lynne




>
>
> Hmm. The harder I think about it, the fuzzier it gets. Like SAEng "just now"
> 'after a few beers'.
>
> -- Mark

--

M. Lynne Murphy, Assistant Professor in Linguistics
Department of English, Baylor University
PO Box 97404, Waco, TX 76798 USA
Phone:  254-710-6983     Fax:  254-710-3894
http://www.baylor.edu/~M_Lynne_Murphy