A concept of time

Ant_222   Mon Jan 22, 2007 2:13 pm GMT
«<<Nope, they both have only one adverb indicating time: yesterday. the other phrase — "in a time span of three weeks" - which you mistook as indicating TIME, actually indicates duration.>>
So I had talked about TIME.»

Yes, mistakenly. And why the heck aren't you saying anything about this time/duration dilemma and blabber about me apeaking of style???

«Can you prove otherwise?»

Yes. Present Perfect there means I don't actually care of when I wrote the book. Only the result — the fact I've written it — is important for me, so I used Presetn Perfect. If you don't believe me, you may ask other Antimooners.

«If the writing happens before "a month ago", why don't you use PAST PERFECT?»

This is when the speaker's attitude toward the action works. And I have found a site where they admit its role and call it aspect:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/frames/contents.htm
(see section dedicated to verbs)

«Ant_222, please do believe that, in news reports, yesterday's happening will be said in Simple Past -- even it has a result or consequence up to the present time.»

Not always. For example:

«The famous artist John Cramp has died of cancer. He was 50 and had two children»

«By the way, you have repeatedly claimed that there is an answer in another web page, without explaining anything. I suggest you should not do this again, at least to me. I don't know what you want me to see.»

Oh, please! You know what I'm talking about!
http://www.proz.com/topic/39405?start=15&float=

«You have to say something, and then quote a web page to support you. If you don't know what you should quote here yourself, how can I know what you want me to see?»

What do you mean by that? I can't write my own thoughts, only copy and paste from different "web pages"?

«If as you see "SAYS"="current opinion is", what is SAID doing? Will you suggest that, in news report, the reporter uses SAID to imply it is not "current opinion" anymore?»

Of course, no! It just states the fact that he said something.

«My dear Ant_222, if I am not fast enough, someone will jump in before me to answer you. Anyone will know how I answer such question. Anyone can see your trick, or your confusion.»

What the heck? I am not confused and that's not a trick! If you have doubts/questions I'll answer them. Right below the quoted fragment I described why I had chosen this term.

«By "My answer will be the same", I mean I have already answered you:
<<"The SENTENCE expresses the meaning, and the tense expresses the TIME." -- I guess I have repeated this more than 50 times here in this thread.>>»

My question was which type of tyme that was. You answered incorrectly at the first time, then I explained why you were wrong and then you shifted the ground so that your reply has nothing to deal with the question asked.

Everytime I show your mistakes clear enough to hinder you from word speculations you ignore me.

«Look at my answer again, SENTENCE is not TIME. This is what I mean. This is my logic.»

That so simple that even a 5-year child knows that! Furthermore, it a tautology. Any two different things are different. All right. I see how advanced your logic is.

«Now look at your own words, you at first asked me about TIME, and then are switching the topic of ACTIONS, SENTENCE, and ACTION, never to mention TIME again.»

Slander.
Sentences describe actions, actions happen in time. I use all the terms.

«Why didn't you first ask me "Are they of the same ACTIONS?" Then I would answer you they are not the same ACTIONS.»

What I asked was whether those actions were of the same time. And you turned it into a grammatically incorrect delirium.

«Tense is used to express time. I have claimed it before. I thought it was true when you said loudly:
<<Subconsciously? I agree with that knowingly!>>»

That's true.

«TIME is to judge, and ACTION is to be judged. How can they be the same? Is a policeman taking a thief to the police station, or the thief taking the policeman to the police station? Who knows? But I think there must be some difference between two terms.»

Time is a property of the action which, in turn, is part of the sentence. Now you write nonsence and screw it all up. Why?

Again, you are making all efforts to misinterpret my words instead of trying hard to understanbd them.

P.S.: I won't be even sligtly amazed is this thread is suddenly closed or removed. It gets very unpleasant for me to post here.
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 2:56 pm GMT
Ant_222 wrote:
<<Yes. PRESENT PERFECT THERE MEANS I DON'T ACTUALLY CARE OF WHEN I WROTE THE BOOK. Only the result — the fact I've written it — is important for me, so I used Presetn Perfect. If you don't believe me, you may ask other Antimooners. >>

My reply:
You are correct. If you don't care of the time, you may do that. Actually, you may now use any tense at all if the time is not taken care of.
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:02 pm GMT
Ant_222 wrote:
<<This is when the speaker's attitude toward the action works. And I have found a site where they admit its role and call it aspect:....>>

My reply:
They call it aspect because they are not aware of the Perfect Time. Time is used to express time, not aspect. The word aspect cannot be defined anyway. If you can define it, then we have past aspect, perfect aspect, and present aspect, because nothing can escape from time. Every thing is subjected to Time.
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:23 pm GMT
I explained:
«Ant_222, please do believe that, in news reports, yesterday's happening will be said in Simple Past -- even it has a result or consequence up to the present time.»

Ant_222 wrote:
<<Not always. For example:
The famous artist John Cramp has died of cancer. He was 50 and had two children>>

My reply:
First, your example is not about yesterday. I am afraid you don't even know where is "yesterday" I was talking about.

Also, do you think his death is before or after "he was 50 and had two children"?

Though the Present Perfect is put in front, we know from the Past-Perfect-Present contrast that his death is in the Perfect Time between "he was 50 and had two children" and Now.

Do you have an alternative explanation?
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:25 pm GMT
<<Oh, please! You know what I'm talking about!
http://www.proz.com/topic/39405?start=15&float=
>>

Then you must know this thread has commented on it.
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:33 pm GMT
My advice:
«You have to say something, and then quote a web page to support you. If you don't know what you should quote here yourself, how can I know what you want me to see?»

You wrote:
<<What do you mean by that? I can't write my own thoughts, only copy and paste from different "web pages"?>>

My reply:
The bad thing is, neither did you write your thoughts, nor copy and paste!!
I am afraid this is not a good way of exchanging idea.
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:45 pm GMT
I said:
«If as you see "SAYS"="current opinion is", what is SAID doing? Will you suggest that, in news report, the reporter uses SAID to imply it is not "current opinion" anymore?»

You wrote:
<<Of course, no! It just states the fact that he said something.>>

My reply:
You are just word-playing. How many terms you will use as the standard of choosing a tense? Is it because of Time? Or Opinion? Or Fact? Or Result? Or Aspect? Or Habitual Action?

SAYS can also be "a fact that he said something", and SAID can also be a "current opinion".
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:49 pm GMT
Ant_222 wrote:
<<My question was which type of tyme that was. You answered incorrectly at the first time, then I explained why you were wrong and then you shifted the ground so that your reply has nothing to deal with the question asked.>>

My reply:
Is this why you first asked of Time, and then talked of the Sentence?
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:55 pm GMT
<<Sentences describe actions, actions happen in time. I use all the terms.>>

My reply:
After you switched to Sentence and Action, you didn't speak of the word 'Time'. Would you like to check it:
<<But where is your logic? Don't you see the difference between those two ACTIONS? In terms of conventional grammar, second SENTENCE expresses a habitual ACTION while the first — how they call it? You should know. I'd call it a passive present ACTION.>>
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 4:00 pm GMT
<<TIME is a property of the ACTION which, in turn, is part of the SENTENCE.>>

So we may mix them up?
22IH   Mon Jan 22, 2007 4:18 pm GMT
There!

850.
Ant_222   Mon Jan 22, 2007 7:51 pm GMT
22IH: thanks for Your little contribution!

«You are correct. If you don't care of the time, you may do that. Actually, you may now use any tense at all if the time is not taken care of.»

Why do you misinterpret me as not careing of the time at all while I was speaking of the time of the book's being written?!

«First, your example is not about yesterday. I am afraid you don't even know where is "yesterday" I was talking about.»

Why. What if he died the day before the news came?

«Also, do you think his death is before or after "he was 50 [1] and had two children [2] "?»

What a stupid question? It was during them! Or, if you want, right when they stoopped being true. Even more correct would be to say that his death caused [1] and [2] to become outdated...

«They call it aspect because they are not aware of the Perfect Time.»
Thatnks God they are not!

«Every thing is subjected to Time.»
Time (capitalized) is way beyond your comprehesion. Your "time" is a poor parody, decribed by an internally conflicting set of statements that are useful only when one wants to dump their brain...

«Though the Present Perfect is put in front, we know from the Past-Perfect-Present contrast that his death is in the Perfect Time between "he was 50 and had two children" and Now.»

This explanation has proven useless. Remember that example about the book? When explaining it you said that logic doesn't allow to explain it through your Past-Perfect-Present because that would have lead to the conclusion that the book was written between 'yesterday' and present and, simuktaneously, it took three week to write it.

Once you got it's nonsense you hubly reffered to "logic" instead of your "Past-Perfect-Present contrast" to smartly avoid the confuson..

From the I ca conclude this contrast is useless woth nothing, only waste of paper (in your book) and time.

«Do you have an alternative explanation?»

Yes. The first sentence reports his death in Present Simle to stress the actuality and newness of this event. Note that same could happily be said in the Past Simple!

«Then you must know this thread has commented on it.»

What? What did say? Anyway, my post is the latest in there.

«The bad thing is, neither did you write your thoughts, nor copy and paste!!»

I have posted a lot of my thoughts. In fact, all I have posted is my thoughts!

«You are just word-playing. How many terms you will use as the standard of choosing a tense? Is it because of Time? Or Opinion? Or Fact? Or Result? Or Aspect? Or Habitual Action?»

Sorry, but if you think that a word-plays differs from argumented but by the ammount of terms used, you are... guess who.

The real difference is not quantitative but qualitative! Namely, it's wheher one conducts a logically correct reasoning or just showers their opponent with lots of terms without actually explaining them.

I have explained all the terms I used. If you still have doubts about a term, just ask me! But I have a suspection that you do undertsnad the menings of Time, Opinion, Result,... don't you?

Since you undertand them why call it a word play?

«SAYS can also be "a fact that he said something" [1], and SAID can also be a "current opinion" [2].»

Yes. But, as you said yourself, they only "can" be such. In my explanation, I have given their real meaning.

For examle:
MAN can be engtense. But it may also happen that it's not engtese, right? The same goes to what you wrote.

«Is this why you first asked of Time, and then talked of the Sentence?»

Another stupid question. Text consists of sentences which can have verbs which, in turn, can assume various tenses which are used to express the time the action expressed by the verb took/takes will take place and the speaker's/writer's attitude toward this action. There you are ;)

If tenses didn't express either aspect or speker's attitude, there would be only three tenses: for Past, Present and Future times respectively.

«After you switched to Sentence and Action, you didn't speak of the word 'Time'. Would you like to check it:
<<But where is your logic? Don't you see the difference between those two ACTIONS? In terms of conventional grammar, second SENTENCE expresses a habitual ACTION while the first — how they call it? You should know. I'd call it a passive present ACTION.>>»

I thought you were smart enought to understand that time is an attribut of action and, therefore, speaking of actions I meant their time.

«<<TIME is a property of the ACTION which, in turn, is part of the SENTENCE.>>

So we may mix them up?»

Why? Thoy mayest not confuse bewixt them ;) The sentence you quoted establishes a relation between the terms of TIME, ACTION and SENTENCE.

I may give a stronger statement:
1. First relation: Sentence->Verb->Tense shows what includes what.
2. Second relation: ACTION->TIME
3. Third relation: VERB<->ACTION; TENSE<->TIME.

So, using (3) you can find how (2) and (1) relate.

Anther question: suppose we have a car and a weel and the weel is part of the car. Can we mix them up?

P.S.: Sorry for typos: I have no time to fix them.
Ant_222   Mon Jan 22, 2007 7:57 pm GMT
22IH:
I wrote:
"thanks for Your little contribution!"
Your->your — I did it accidentally ;)
Ant_222   Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:12 pm GMT
If you want, I can point you another magor mistake you have fallen into.

You always require exact formal definitions like if we were computers. Why not use the features of human thinking to our advantage? Intuition, emotions, heruistics, abstraction...

Linguistics has lots of fuzzy factors, so the more formal you want your definitions to be the less correct they'll become.

Think as a human being, not as a dumb computer.

What I can suggest, is to read the works of the following authors:
1. Aristotle ("Organon"),
2. George Boole ("An Investigation of the Laws of Thought"),
3. Bertrand Russel ("The Principles of Mathematics"),
4. Euclid ("The elements").

Not only will you understand logic better but also significally improve your English (authors 2 and 3 are native speakers of the language).

All listed books are available on the iternet. Try Project Gutenberg, for example.

P.S.: I think you'll change your views upon reading.
engtense   Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:19 pm GMT
Ant_222 wrote:
<<Yes. PRESENT PERFECT THERE MEANS I DON'T ACTUALLY CARE OF WHEN I WROTE THE BOOK. Only the result — the fact I've written it — is important for me, so I used Presetn Perfect. If you don't believe me, you may ask other Antimooners. >>

My reply:
<<You are correct. If you don't care for the time, you may do that. Actually, you may now use any tense if the time is not cared for.>>

Ant_222 wrote:
<<Why do you misinterpret me as not careing of the time at all while I was speaking of the time of the book's being written?!>>