fivejedjon wrote:
It's not tenseless. I simply feel that the words 'present' and 'past' are not very helpful names for these tenses as they operate in modern English. I think that terms such as 'unmarked' and 'marked/remote/distancing/' would be less confusing. However, the current names have been used by so many people for such a long time that they are unlikely to change.
I must confess that I find it extraordinarily difficult to see how re-labelling 'present' and 'past' tenses in this way could possibly do anything but cause the most enormous confusion! Permit me a little skit which will probably express my thoughts more eloquently than any amount of prose:
TEACHER: Good morning, class. A question, Pedro?
PEDRO: Yes, when we are going to learn how to talk about past thing? All the time in this class we use
present - "what time do you get up in the morning?", "what kind of food do you like?" Is getting boring!! I wanna talk about my childhood in Barcelona, or the movie I go to last week...
TEACHER: Now, Pedro, I told you before - we want none of that kind of talk here. There's no such thing as the 'past', or the 'present': they are just illusions peddled by traditional grammarians who want to sell their stuffy, old-fashioned grammar books. These so-called 'present' and 'past tenses' have nothing to do with time at all: you've just been brainwashed into
thinking that they do!
PEDRO: But what if I want to talk about what happen yesterday, I cannot do in English?
TEACHER: But of
course you can!
PEDRO: But yesterday - she is the past, is it not?
TEACHER: Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. OK, I grant you it would be the past in French, or German, or Spanish, or Latin, or Italian...but you've got to understand that English is just...well, different. You must never expect English to have things like past tenses or subjunctives, just because all the other languages do. Look, I thought we'd been through all this!
PEDRO:So how I talk about yesterday in your stupid English?
TEACHER: Well, you just use what we modern, enlightened teachers call 'temporally or conceptually remote from current reality' verb forms. Now that's a simple enough term, isn't it it? I mean, no long four-letter words to remember!
PEDRO: So this "temporarily...ah...current...concept..ah..." thingy is like what, for example? How we make?
TEACHER: Well, for regular verbs you stick
-ed on the end. 'Play' becomes 'played', 'walk' becomes 'walked', and so forth.
PEDRO: Oh, you mean PAST TENSES!! Why you not just say that? I learn them in school years ago!
TEACHER: Learn
ed, Pedro, learn
ed -
temporally or conceptually remote from current reality-form, not
unmarked, temporally or conceptually proximal to current reality-form. Oh, dear, I can see I'm going to have to set you a lot more homework from now on!
I have learnt recently that the use of the present subjunctive appears to be increasing in BrE. If that be the case, then I may have to rethink.
On the positive side, I am glad that, unlike certain other contributors here, you do at least have the integrity not to present idiosyncratic theories as standard approaches. I would, however, say that, in my
very humble opinion as a grammarian, any attempt to tinker with a centuries-old, tried-and-trusted and universally accepted method of linguistic description is likely, sooner or later, to end in disaster!