Subjunctive(?): not critical that

[JAMES A. LANDAU Netscape. Just the Net You Need.]

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:51:50 Zulu minus 4  Mark Mandel said to me

"maybe you're using "aspect" in a sense I don't understand"

The answer is Yes and No.

>From Britannica Online:

http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-38911/aspect

<quote>
The Proto-Indo-European verb had three aspects: imperfective, perfective, and stative. Aspect refers to the nature of an action as described by the speaker—e.g., an event occurring once, an event recurring repeatedly, a continuing process, or a state. The difference between English simple and “progressive” verb forms is largely one of aspect.

Aspectual differences play a crucial role [in modern Greek]. Roughly, the perfective marker indicates completed, momentary action; its absence signifies an action viewed as incomplete, continuous, or repeated. Thus the imperfective imperative ghráphe might mean ‘start writing!' or ‘write regularly!' while ghrápse means rather ‘write down! (on a particular occasion).'...
</quote>

Spanish and French (and I suppose Latin and the rest of the Romance languages) make much less use of aspect.

The problem is that traditionally English grammar has been taught as if it were Latin grammar.  For example, an infinitive in Latin is a single word and therefore cannot be split, which may be the reason for the prescriptive dictum against split infinitives.  But in English you are able to, when you feel the need and without any intent to be ungrammatical, split an infinitive.  Similarly Latin has rules preventing prepositions from moving away from their objects, but in English you are able to use a preposition to end a sentence with.

Unfortunately English is close enough to Latin that you can try, with considerable success, to straitjacket the English verb into a Latin conjugation.  I remember all those junior high school drills on conjugating a verb into present, past, future, present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect.  It looks pretty, but it leaves out so much that gives the English verb its flavor and usefulness.

Bluntly: English has aspect.

The most obvious use of aspect is the difference in meaning between the simple and the progressive forms of the verb, e.g. “they sing” versus “they are singing”.

If you want to be a splitter, you can show four separate aspects:  simple, simple perfect (“they have sung”), progressive, and progressive perfect (“they have been singing”).

And then there is the “used to” form of the verb, which should be considered still another aspect.

So far we are using the word “aspect” as in the Britannic Online quote above, where is means not when the action occurred but how the time(s) it occurred are described, e.g. simple, progressive, formerly habitual (the “used to” form).

But my tenth-grade English teacher let us into a little secret: English does not have one conjugation; it has three, namely “they sing”, “they are singing”, and “they do sing”.  I don’t remember what she called “they do sing/they do not sing” but I shall call it the “emphatic/negative” something.

Emphatic/negative what?  Here is where I beg to differ from tradition and call “do sing/do not sing” the “emphatic/negative ASPECT”.  It is not a time-based distinction but there really is no other word to use.

How many of the my-definition aspects does English have?

My list:
1.    Simple                 they sing, they sang, they will sing, they shall sing, they are going to sing
2.    Perfect                they have sung etc.
3.    Simple progressive     they are singing
4.    Progressive perfect    they have been singing
5.    Former                 they used to sing
6.    Emphatic/negative      they do sing/they do not sing
7.    Ability                they can sing, they could sing
8.    Obligation             they must sing, they have to sing, they are to sing, they ought to sing
9.    Preference             they should sing
10.   Conditional            they would sing
11.   Permissive/subjunctive they may sing, they might sing

Note that I list number 11 as “subjunctive”.  This aspect has two meanings.  The first is, as the old saying goes, “Yes, you can, but you may not”.  The other is to express what other languages express by the subjunctive mood.

OT:  the ADS splash page currently has this unintentional double-entendre:
"Papers dealing with any aspect of dialect of English or dialects of other languages spoken in the US as well as any on other aspects of language variation are welcome"

           James A. Landau
           test engineer
           Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
           8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
           West Atlantic City NJ 08232 USA
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