Duration in English: A Basic Choice, Illustrated in Comparison with Dutch [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9783110859942, 9783110129212

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The systems of mood and aspect: Form and meaning
1. Time as represented in the present perfect/voltooid tegenwoordige tijd
2. Mood
3. Aspect
2. The first difference: Expressing “duration so far”
3. The second difference: The Transpast Transcendent and the expression of past time
1. The Transpast Transcendent: an event
1.1. Other grammarians on the Transpast Transcendent
2. Interceptive possibilities of the Transpast Transcendent
3. The second major difference between English and Dutch
4. The Transpast Transcendent in English + “past time” adverbs
5. A basic difference between the Transpast Transcendent and the Past Immanent in Dutch
4. The third difference: The elusiveness of present relevance
1. The nature of present relevance
1.1. Inferences
1.2. Experience
1.3. Primary versus secondary effects
1.4. Conditioning effect of a deceased subject
1.5. Persistence of the effect
2. Applying the explanation to the translation of Dutch examples
Conclusion
1. Summary
2. Problem cases
2.1. Events just over
2.2. The verb forms after enumerative clauses
2.3. Coming back to Chapter 2
3. A general problem
4. A glance at two other Germanic languages
4.1. German
4.2. Swedish
5. A final remark
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Duration in English

Topics in English Linguistics 5 Editors

Jan Svartvik Herman Wekker

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Duration in English A Basic Choice, Illustrated in Comparison with Dutch

Lia Korrel

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1991

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

® Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Korrel, Lia. 1951 — Duration in English : a basic choice, illustrated in comparison with Dutch / Lia Korrel. p. cm. — (Topics in English linguistics ; 5) Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D. — Universite Laval, 1988), originally presented under the title: Representing duration in the Dutch and the English verb. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-012921-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English language — Tense. 2. English language—Grammar, Comparative —Dutch. 3. Dutch language—Grammar, Comparative —English. 4. Dutch language — Tense. I. Title. II. Series. PE1301.K67 1991 425 —dc20 91-36113 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek

— Cataloging in Publication Data

Korrel, Lia: Duration in English : a basic choice, illustrated in comparison with Dutch / Lia Korrel. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1991 (Topics in English linguistics ; 5) Zugl.: Quebec, Univ. Laval, Diss., 1988 u.d.T.: Korrel, Lia: Representing duration in the Dutch and the English verb ISBN 3-11-012921-3 NE: G T

© Copyright 1991 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. Printing: Gerike GmbH, Berlin Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin Printed in Germany.

To all who made it possible

Acknowledgements

This book is a revised version of my thesis called Representing duration in the Dutch and the English verb: the three major differences. It was accepted for a Ph.D.-degree by the Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada in October 1988. I consider it a privilege to thank here Professor Roch Valin and Professor Walter Hirtle for helping me find my path in Psychomechanics. To Professor Valin I owe a debt of gratitude for having awoken in me a deep admiration for language and for the interest he has taken in the progress of this study. Chapters 1 and 2, especially, reflect in no mean degree the result of his interest. However, this study would never have been brought to a successful conclusion without the indefatigable support and guidance of Professor Hirtle, who has shown me over the years how to apply the general principles of Psychomechanics to a practical problem, and with infinite patience painstakingly revised the numerous drafts I submitted, so that a coherent argument could emerge. Further I thank Lori Morris for the helpful comments on examples in Chapter 4 and the staff at the Fonds Gustave Guillaume at the Universite Laval for the pleasant working atmosphere. A grateful acknowledgement is made to the Ministere de l'Education du Quebec (Fonds FCAR), without whose financial support this study would not have been completed. I am indebted to Dr. Harry Perridon for his help with the section on Swedish in the Conclusion. Finally I thank my sister Anneke Korrel and my brother Peter Korrel for their help in preparing the manuscript for publication and Joop Wiggers Produkties BV for their kind permission to reproduce illustrations from their series Jan, Jans en de Kinderen.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1. The systems of mood and aspect: Form and meaning

9

1. 2. 3.

Time as represented in the present perfect/voltooid tegenwoordige tijd Mood Aspect

9 12 19

2. The first difference: Expressing "duration so far"

31

3. The second difference: The Transpast Transcendent and the expression of past time

43

1. 1.1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Transpast Transcendent: an event Other grammarians on the Transpast Transcendent Interceptive possibilities of the Transpast Transcendent The second major difference between English and Dutch The Transpast Transcendent in English + "past time" adverbs A basic difference between the Transpast Transcendent and the Past Immanent in Dutch

4. The third difference: The elusiveness of present relevance 1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 2.

The nature of present relevance Inferences Experience Primary versus secondary effects Conditioning effect of a deceased subject Persistence of the effect Applying the explanation to the translation of Dutch examples

44 46 49 59 63 67 77 78 90 91 93 96 98 101

X

Contents

Conclusion

113

1. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3. 4. 4.1. 4.2.

Summary Problem cases Events just over The verb forms after enumerative clauses Coming back to Chapter 2 A general problem A glance at two other Germanic languages German Swedish

113 115 115 117 119 121 121 122 123

5.

A final remark

126

Notes

129

Bibliography

135

Index

143

Introduction

Science is founded on the insight that the world of appearances tells of hidden things, ... One such insight is that what seems to be disorder in language hides an underlying order — a wonderful order. (Guillaume 1984: 3)

Although it may not be immediately apparent from the title, this study deals with the present perfect. It describes an attempt to discern the reason for the three major differences between English and Dutch in the use of this verb form. Two of them are well-known and have been widely commented on: a. The use in English of the present perfect "for an action or state beginning at some time in the past and continuing up to the moment of speaking, where Dutch has the simple present" (Zandvoort [1969]: 77): (1)

Wij kennen elkaar al jar en. 'We've known each other for years.'

b. The frequent use of the present perfect in Dutch where English has the past tense "when attention is drawn to the time at which an action or event took place in the past" (Zandvoort [1969]: 78): (2)

Ik heb zijn brief een week geleden ontvangen. Ί received his letter a week ago.'

These two differences will be treated in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively. The third difference is less obvious. There is a use that Dutch shares with English, namely the "resultative perfect which denotes a past action connected, through its result, with the present moment" (Zandvoort [1969]: 80). A clear case is: (3)

Ik heb een nieuwe auto gekocht. 'I've bought a new car.'

What counts, however, as a result is not always the same in the two languages. Illustration 1 shows how a little boy, on coming home, explains why his girlfriend is crying. (4)

Ze is gevallen met haar fiets. (Kruis 1976: 19) 'She fell off her bicycle.'

2

Introduction

Illustration

1

The subject clearly has a result of the fall in mind, yet in this context the present perfect must be translated by a simple past in English. In (5), however, a result is felt in both languages. (5)

Jans! De pot met kralen is van de trap gevallen. Кип je even helpen met opruimen? (Kruis 1980: 43) 'Jans! The j a r with beads has fallen f r o m the stairs. Could you help me pick them up?'

Again, in both of the following examples, a present result is felt in Dutch, whereas English has the present perfect only in the latter. In example (6), as illustration 2 shows, the girl, coming h o m e after an afternoon's fishing, answers her father, and in (7) the speaker is holding a young starling, caught by herself and a friend. (6)

a. [Hebben jullie] nog wat gevangen? b. Zo'n kanjer. Jeroen heeft hem gevangen en... (Kruis 1975: 5) a. '[Did you] catch anything?' b. Ά whopper. Jeroen caught it and ...'

Illustration

2

Introduction

(7)

3

Kijk eens pap, we hebben een jonge spreeuw gevangen. (Kruis 1976: 25) 'Look dad, we've caught a young starling.'

To give one final pair, in (8) a little girl is thrilled by the quantity of presents left by Santa Claus and in (9) a husband comes home with a surprise for his wife. (8)

ООО! Heeft Sinterklaas dat allemaal voor ons gebracht? (Kruis 1971: 44) 'ООН! Did Santa bring all that for us?'

(9)

Kijk eens wat ik heb meegebracht: de eerste perziken van dit seizoen. (Kruis 1976: 10) 'Look what I've brought: the first peaches of the season.'

The reason for these and similar differences will be given in Chapter 4. An answer to the problem why the present perfect should be used so differently in English and Dutch would both constitute real theoretical progress and facilitate the teaching of the use of the English present perfect to Dutch students — being a native speaker of Dutch, I adopt the point of view of a Dutch student trying to master the English language — and, presumably, of Dutch to English students. For although the first two differences seem pretty clear-cut, the third one poses a daunting problem. When there is no clear indication of past time, how can we tell the way a Dutch present perfect is to be translated into English? In the absence of any apparent reason for the choice of the simple past in English here, a correct translation would almost require a sort of sixth sense. Lakoff was very sensitive to this elusiveness of "present relevance": It is by this time a truism that the perfect tense describes action in the past with 'present relevance' ... One unsatisfactory point in all these discussions is the complete absence of a definition of 'present relevance', or a statement as to when something can have it, and when it can't. This will not be remedied here. (Lakoff 1970: 844)

The present study was undertaken in the hope of throwing light on this problem. It was prompted by the conviction that whatever the reason for this different perception of "present relevance", and the curious opposition simple present/present perfect, present perfect/simple past in (1) and (2), it had to be systematic, and hence capable of explanation; otherwise the by now generally accepted concept of language as a system would have to be declared fallacious.

4

Introduction

To start any reflection on a problem one needs of course a theory through which to view it.1 My search for an adequate theory led me to the Psychomechanics of Language, which seemed to provide the analytical tools required to comprehend the systematic difference between the uses of the present perfect in English and in Dutch. To orient the reader, a few remarks on some basic characteristics of this theory will be helpful. As in other approaches to linguistics, the sentence is seen as a systematic grouping of words, but Psychomechanics goes beyond this in postulating that the word in itself is a system. The starting point for its analyses is the obvious postulate that in order for a word to appear in syntax, it must first be constructed. In fact, the originality of Psychomechanics lies in its emphasis on the operations involved in the construction of a word, in the systematic assembly of its component parts, and more specifically the grammatical side of it. Moreover, each of these component parts of a word is conceived of as essentially a bit of meaning, a significant element entering into the total significate of the word. In its analysis of the present perfect, for instance, Psychomechanics does not stop at saying that its mark is have + past participle, but tries to discern the mental make-up, the significant elements of each of these two parts, as well as the effect of combining them into a compound verb. In addition, Psychomechanics stresses that in order to understand this verb form, one must first know what constitutes a verb, the general system of which it is a part. A verb differs in nature from a noun, not because of its position in the sentence, but because of the meaningful forms that go into the making of it. Gustave Guillaume, the founder of Psychomechanics, stated that every verb contains the following five formative elements: voice, aspect, mood, tense and person, which systematically combine to make this part of speech. These grammatical categories are often associated with the verb by other grammarians as accidental characteristics, as properties a verb may or may not have. 2 But Guillaume stressed that each of these categories involves an operation yielding an essential component of a verb and so each is to be found in every verb form. Thus, in Psychomechanics not only the verb phrase is seen as an analyzable whole, the verb itself is seen as a complex whole as well, made up of a lexical part and a grammatical part, the latter composed of its characterizing categories. Moreover, not only is a verb seen as a system of constitutive parts, but in turn each of these categories is considered a system in itself. This tenet facilitates the study of the verb, or any other part of speech for that matter, as it allows one to examine each subsystem separately in an effort to fathom its grammatical role, to find out

Introduction

5

what formal (as opposed to lexical) meaning it permits the speaker to represent. In this way the myriad of problems a verb poses can be split up, analysed separately, and progress in the understanding of one or more categories may be made while others remain elusive for the time being. Seeing each verbal category as a system in its own right, with a meaning proper to it, leads to the next axiom of Psychomechanics, namely that the observed meanings of a given verb sign in spoken or written language are manifestations of a single underlying, hidden, potential meaning. That is to say, the meaning of any word or morpheme is seen at two levels, its actual meanings or senses which can be observed, and its single potential meaning which lies hidden behind it. In postulating one grammatical meaning for each form Psychomechanics does not stand alone — Jakobson speaks of Gesamtbedeutung, Hjelmslev of Content to name two others — but to my knowledge Psychomechanics is the only theory where the problem is posed as to the nature of this single meaning and how it is possible that the "one" becomes "many". For it is not sufficient to maintain that in order to make communication possible, to allow a listener to reconstruct the message the speaker wishes to convey, there must be constants to which the physical signs he hears are related. It is not enough to point out that the alternative to postulating some such underlying significate, namely to hold that words derive their meaning solely from the context, implies that a combination of meaningless entities would somehow yield a positive, meaningful content. To make the essential condition of "one form, one meaning" plausible, a theory is needed that accounts for the passage from the potential "one" to the actual "many". In Psychomechanics the basic principle to explain how a morpheme or verb form can have multiple meaning — exhibit polysemy — and still retain its grammatical unity is operativity. Everything in language involves process. This principle is found in putting a sentence together, in putting a word together and even in each grammatical category that helps determine the part of speech the word belongs to. A n y grammatical system consists of an operation between limits, an operation which may be interrupted at one of the significant positions in the stretch of operative time contained in the system to yield the actual meanings observed. That is, the actual meanings belonging to a given system are produced at different instants in this preconscious operation of thought, and are determined by their relative positions in the stretch of operative time involved. For the moment this description of Psychomechanic's main

6

Introduction

tool of analysis may well appear rather cryptic, 3 but it is hoped that through its application to the problem posed in the present study its explanatory power will become clear. It stands to reason that the systems alluded to reside in the preconscious part of the mind an