Learning the Logic of Natural English Grammar-Part 2
A brief recapitulation of Part 1.
Your sister has broken the vase.=Present Perfect TENSE=Time Aspect TENSE
What is the logic of the name?
No Voice — does it mean we don’t have to pay any attention at all to Voice?
The first word in the name shows Time — does it mean Time is the first thing we should think about when we want to construct a sentence?
Does Aspect include TENSE here, or is Aspect a subcategory within the TENSE?
(– While ASPECT always includes TENSE, tense can occur without aspect (David falls in love, David fell in love).
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/verbs/tense.htm
– For each grammatical TENSE, there are subcategories called ASPECTS. ASPECT refers to the duration of an event within a particular TENSE.
http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/blog/learn-english/grammar/tense-aspect/)
TENSE — What is the word for here? What does it mean? What does it show? What information does it contain? — I have no answers to all these questions - grammar analysis does not help.
At this moment, it is logical to think that the search should be narrowed. System seems like a good idea as we can often see the word in combinations like Tense and Aspect System, Tense+Aspect System, Tense-Aspect System, Tense/Aspect System, the English tense system, the verb tense system in English, the English verb system.
“A system is a set of interacting or interdependent component parts forming a complex/intricate whole. Every system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System
“Systems that are purposed by man inherently have a major flaw they must have a starting assumption(s) in which this starting assumption(s) is used to build further knowledge upon. This starting assumption(s) is not inherently bad, but it is used as the foundation of the system…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System#cite_note-1
We already know what Tense-Aspect is — anything but a System.
Moreover, Tense as a grammatical term readily, as if by magic, disappears from the language the moment Voice appears on the scene.
Doing analysis of The English Verb System is another chance for us to learn the truth about TENSES. You may say here that so much has already been written not only about The English Verb System itself, but about how it works as well — why bother?
Anyway, let’s see ourselves. “So much written” is exactly what we are going to analyze and see how it matches the definition of a System.
– Is it one whole? — No, it is not. With tenses (the way it is described in all existing coursebooks), all verb forms are split up into two separate groups:
“This means that verbs with tense are finite, and verbs without tense are nonfinite.” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/verbs/finite.htm
In other words, it is a kind of a hidden barrier, or once we think of Infinitives, Gerunds and Participles as being “without tense”, we have no possibility to consider all verb forms as a whole. (for example, have you ever seen anything like Active Perfect Gerund TENSE or Simple Infinitive TENSE?)
– Is it delineated by its spatial boundaries? — No, it is not. Otherwise, how can we explain the origin of questions like these: “How many verb tenses are there in English?”, “Do participles indicate tense?”, “Is Modality an aspect of the Verb?”, “What is present passive perfect participle?”, etc.? https://www.quora.com/profile/Leo-Hmury
– Is it delineated by its temporal boundaries? — No, it is not. Otherwise, how can we explain the origin of theories like this one:
“What is a Tense? Declerck’s Theory of Tense
This section provides a brief description of the temporal system proposed by Declerck (1991, 2006). For the sake of comprehensibility, Declerck’s terminology and basic assumptions will be briefly outlined.
Terminology
Declerck (2006: 22) conceives of tense as a “linguistic concept [which] denotes the form taken by the verb to […] express the temporal relation between the time of the situation in question and an ‘orientation time’ which may be either the ‘temporal zero-point’ (which is usually the time of speech […]) or another orientation time that is temporally related to the temporal zero-point.” The orientation time is “[a]ny time that can provide the ‘known’ time (or one of the known times) required for the expression of the temporal relation(s) encoded in a tense form” (Declerck 2006: 117). The temporal zero-point (t0) is the point in time from which all expressed temporal relations take their starting point. It is usually (but not necessarily) the time of the utterance.
In (6) below, the orientation time corresponds to t0, whereas in (7), the past tense form confessed locates the time of the confession in the past, and the past perfect form had stolen expresses that the situation (namely the theft) was committed even before the confession. In the latter case, the time of the confession is thus the orientation time for the past perfect form, which in turn lies before (and therefore does not equal) t0. The form had stolen locates the situation relative to an orientation time which is itself located relative to speech time (=t0).
(6) I met him last night.
(7) Last night he confessed that he had stolen the money.”?
http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Tenses_of_English
– Is it described by its structure? — No, it is not. “The final takeaway of all this discussion is that English verbs are complex and you probably can’t count how many forms they have.”
http://www.faqoverflow.com/english/91122.html
– Does it have a starting assumption(s) … used to build further knowledge upon… as the foundation of the system…? — Yes, it does. No doubt it is Tenses. But the only reasonable conclusion is that this assumption is absolutely wrong.
Consequently, with the way The English verb system is described in all existing coursebooks, it is not a System at all.
The answer to all my questions at the beginning of this part is simple: the term ‘tense’ is just a meaningless (= empty) word in the English language, there is NOTHING to explain about TENSES and therefore NOTHING to understand.
Instead of being of at least some use, it only litters grammar with unnecessary terminology and argumentation, both as meaningless and empty as the word itself.
Roughly speaking, personally, I think of Tenses as a virus planted in the English language centuries ago.
Remember Seanan McGuire’s “The rules of English grammar were devised by an evil linguist… we bastards are still paying today.” from Part 1.?
The alien term displaced Voice in the very core of the English Verb Grammar. To secure it against being discovered (= to split up all English verb forms into two separate groups), the terms tensed and non-tensed verbs were invented to be used instead of verbs and verbals, and then camouflaged with the names finite and non-finite verbs.
By the way, in the 2002 revision of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, finite and non-finite verbs were renamed primary and secondary verbs.
http://www.grammar-quizzes.com/sent-nonfinite.html#primarysecondary
In actual fact, as we can very clearly see, both primary and secondary verbs (= verbs and verbals in absolutely all their forms) have only one and the same common feature: they all show Voice and Aspect.
