Grammar and Reality

Well, I seem to have more to say about grammar. My thinking has progressed from where it was a week and a half ago when I last wrote here.

I’ve been thinking more on two parallel tracks: English verbs and Chinese sentence structure.

Let’s start with the English verbs. You may remember that I observed that the English verbal system finally kinda made sense to me. The key there was this change in my thinking: in the past, I’ve always tended to think of “past, present, future tense” as indicating that the action of the sentence was in the past, present or future. And this just isn’t the case. At moments I feel like maybe I’m dumb, and everyone English speaker but me must already know this and somehow I’ve overlooked this for 30+ years (and I must have been sleeping in Elementary school when they taught us this). At other moments, though, I suspect most people are pretty deluded about this.

I think the heart of the problem is that just about any explanation of verb tenses starts with the present/past tense distinction (“I work” and “I worked”). It seems clear that in “I work” the action is in the present, and in “I worked” the action is in the past. You then meet “I will work” and the action seems in the future. The perfect, progressive and perfect progressive have such baffling names with the baffling array of “auxiliary verbs” (have, has, is, had been, will have been) that one tends to just put the mind into neutral and follow along with the original assumption. If you don’t, then you meet “I will have worked” and are told this is “present perfect”, and your intuition tells you the action is in the past so how can it be present? So you give up and assume the teacher knows what they’re talking about and again the mind goes into neutral and you stop thinking.

There’s two problems. The first, as I observed before, is that actual the past, present, future distinction has nothing intrinsically with when the action occurred, it has to do with where the subject or speaker “is” in time. “I have worked”, “I have been working” and “I am working” are all present tense, which tells you the speaker is situating themselves in the present time telling you about an action that occurred in the past (in the first two cases) or that is happening in the present time.

As I observed before, the beauty of this system is that we can easily talk about relatively complex relationships of actions in time (I read something today which said something like “he has finished the task and is working on the new job”, which is all situated in the present time, but refers to two actions at different points in time with some implicit relationship between the occurrence of those actions).

The second problem, I’ve come to realize, is that I think in many ways the “simple past” is actually an anomolous tense. If you look at this entry in wikipedia, it shows a nice 12 cell table showing the verb tenses, with the simple past, present and future in a nice column. The trouble is that I don’t think it’s quite appropriate to group them that way. The simple present and simple future speak of an action either habitually occurring or kinda unspecifically occurring from present or future time frame. The simple past, however, generally refers to an action which is complete. This seems a bit odd. It seems even more odd when you realize you can say things like “When i was a teenager, I would play cards every thursday”. That “would play” seems suspiciously like it is more consistent with the simple present and simple future, in that it speaks of a habitually occurring or unspecifically occurring action.

As I read the wikipedia page more closely, I began to realize that the verb tense situation is even more complex. The present perfect, for example, seems to sometimes refer to actions completed in the past, and sometimes to actions in the past that are still ongoing, and I’m not quite sure why this is (though, I agree with their analysis). The page also refers to 9 other tenses which seem like they might legitimately belong to the base 12 cell table (e.g. “i was going to work”).

If you think about this, it may begin to give you a headache. It seems relatively safe to say that one could easily argue for a different organization of the English verb system than is conventional. Which is “true” and who decides? Given how long English grammar has been studied, and how widely it is taught, it is interesting to me how easily I can reach a point of disagreeing with the conventional view. Is it any wonder I’m pulling my hair out with Chinese?

The important point, for me, however, is not actually all these tense differences. The important point is actually the crucial importance that time plays in just about every sentence, both the position of the speaker or subject in time and the position of the action in time. You probably can’t speak good English without having internalized this system. And since I have yet to see a “learn english” web site or textbook, I guess most people must go the “constructionist” route and try to intuit this system.

This leads me back to Chinese. I’m more and more convinced that if the heart of an English sentence is time, then the heart of a Chinese sentence is change. More and more it looks to me like sentences are arranged in a way to convey a message of change. if you look at Chinese in this light, many of the baffling sentence structures begin to make sense. if you look at it through an English (or other european language) viewpoint, the elements of a sentence (subject, verb, object) have stereotyped positions which are relatively fixed. you might change the order of the parts to emphasize a part (e.g. the whole passive tense (to me) seems to be about emphasizing the object of an action). But, in Chinese the order of the elements seems like it has more to do with explaining the situation before and after an action. Even the notion of a “subject” and “object” seem a little blurry at times, for both subjects and objects (as well as indirect objects and other such entities) sometimes get marked with “prepositions”.. sometimes this seems to serve to disambiguate which is which, but more often it seems to have to do with emphasizing how they are involved in the action. Anyway, Chinese is actually remarkably rich in allowing one to express how an action has “resulted”. Again, I’ll go back to my earlier point, and say that I’m not sure it even makes sense to talk about Chinese as a SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV or whatever language, for that implies that positions in a sentence are fixed in a way that I don’t think Chinese cares about.

Summary:

• One can punch holes in the conventional grammatical explanation of English verbs, which reminds one that all of how we describe reality is subjective and not absolute. (there is no One True Grammar)
• English sentences, regardless of the exact morphological forms used, implicitly tell one a vast amount about time (with, I think, two aspects of time being conveyed by every verb).
• English learners are not taught this explicitly, and so must infer it. Wow.
• I’m hypothesizing that Chinese grammar is as focused on change/results as English is on time, and that when looked at in this way it begins to be sensible.

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