Re: Rosetta Stone of Verb Aspect

Jonathan Robie (jwrobie@mindspring.com)
Thu, 07 Aug 1997 06:51:30 -0400

At 11:45 AM 8/3/97 +0000, Clayton Bartholomew wrote:
>Thanks to Jonathan for the Rosetta Stone. Looking it over, one thing
>jumps out at me. Most of the recent models seem to have relegated the
>*future* to a kind of orphan status. This gives me reason to doubt the
>general validity of these models. If you have to send a major component
>of the verb system into permanent exile to make your model work then it
>is time to go back to the drawing table and start over. This is where I
>think we are headed.

I think that it is more true to say that Olsen and Fanning see the future as
a pure tense ("only time") which does not convey aspect ("view of the event
or state"). That doesn't mean that the future is an orphan, it just means
that it is a pure tense.

>I think we are going to discover that Porter and
>Fanning are simply wrong, not about details but their basic approach is
>wrong.

Porter and Fanning have very different basic approaches. Proving one of them
to be "simply wrong" would not prove the other one to be wrong.

Jonathan

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