stoutfellow: Joker (Default)
[personal profile] stoutfellow
Blackfoot marks verbs for tense and aspect. Its tense system is somewhat different from that of English; in addition to past, present, and future, it has a tense indicating near future. (In English, only past and present are marked on the verb; future is marked periphrastically, by "will/shall" or "to be going to". We also have periphrases for near future and near past, as well as a variety of other constructions. Whether these - or even the ordinary future - should be considered as tenses in English is a matter of taste. All four Blackfoot tenses are marked on the verb.) Future and near-future are marked by means of prefixes; the two prefixes are similar and presumably related. There are three or four different ways of marking the past, apparently as a matter of taste or regional usage - they don't seem to have different meanings.

Where tense describes the temporal location of an event/process/state, aspect describes its temporal contour. Blackfoot distinguishes two main aspects, durative and perfective, both by means of prefixes. Durative aspect indicates that something is ongoing, perfective that it is complete. (A verb may carry neither prefix, in which case there is no commitment to either status.) English marks for durative aspect with the "progressive" construction, "to be verbing". Perfective is usually translated into English with the "perfect" construction, "to have verbed", but this is somewhat misleading. The perfect is sometimes used to indicate completed action, but its core meaning is past event with present relevance. (The "past perfect" transposes this into a past viewpoint situation - past relevance of further-past event - and something similar is true of "future perfect".) That the English perfect is not a true perfective is indicated by the fact that it can occur together with the progressive: "to have been verbing". (Durative and perfective are obviously incompatible.)

There are other aspect markers in Blackfoot, but I haven't gotten to them yet.

Blackfoot verbs stems fall into four classes. First, they may be intransitive or transitive. If the object of (what we would consider) a transitive verb is not specified or is non-particular - see the post "Blackfoot I" - an intransitive verb stem is used. So, for example, "I bought this house" would use the transitive verb-stem "ohpómmatooh"; "I bought a house" would use the intransitive stem "ohpomma". Intransitive verbs are further divided according to whether they take animate or inanimate subjects. (For example, the stem "soká'pii" means "to be good", used of an inanimate-class subject; "soká'pssi" is used if the subject is animate.) Transitive verbs always have animate subjects. (Here, the subject must be semantically animate; being of animate gender is not enough. Would-be subjects which are not animate are handled differently.) They are divided according to the animacy of the object of the verb.

There are obviously situations, therefore, where English would use the same verb regardless of transitivity (to say nothing of animacy questions) and Blackfoot would use different stems. The stems, as the examples above suggest, are clearly related, but there is no way of predicting the forms of the related stems. (If they were, we'd be able to separate out affixes meaning "intransitive", "animate subject", or the like; but we can't.) This is not that peculiar. In Russian, for example, different verb stems are used depending on whether the aspect is perfective or imperfective, and there is no dependable way of predicting the shapes of the pairs of stems.

Date: 2005-11-08 03:43 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] countrycousin.livejournal.com
Today, but long before I saw this post, this phrase from Phyllis in "Iolanthe" was running through my head "I can spell any word that I use, and my grammar's as good as my neighbor's." Good thing she didn't have you for a neighbor ;<) .

Very interesting.

Can't English say "I have been running" to indicate an action that took some time but is now completed (thankfully). Or was that your point about true perfective? Not sure I got that.

Thanks for a very intriguing post!

Date: 2005-11-08 04:13 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
Can't English say "I have been running" to indicate an action that took some time but is now completed (thankfully).

Yes - but "I have been running for ten minutes" indicates that the action is still ongoing. "I ran for ten minutes" would actually be closer to perfective than "I have been running for ten minutes" is. As I said, the perfect can be used as a perfective, but it often isn't, and its core meaning lies elsewhere.

Date: 2005-11-08 04:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
Mm. Wait. I think I missed your point. I'm not sure, after all, that "I have been running" really can be construed as complete - or if it can, it's a matter of context, not of the meaning of the phrase in itself.

I'll have to think about that.

Date: 2005-11-08 04:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hornedhopper.livejournal.com
I'm sure there may be exceptions, but I would construe "I have been running" to be an event started in the past that is still taking place.

Hmm. Although, as I think about it, as an answer to the question, "Why are you panting?", "I have been running" indicates that the activity has just ceased. In this case, I would be comfortable answering with "have been" or "was."

Does Blackfoot have a passive voice where the subject is understood as animate and the transitive verb form is used?

Date: 2005-11-08 04:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
The thing is this. "I have been running" may be used in a context where the event in question is complete, but is that actually what it means? I'm inclined to doubt it. (For a somewhat analogous situation, in English the present tense may be used to describe past events, to increase their narrative, er, "presentness" - "present" in the sense of here: "So, I'm walking the dogs, when suddenly this rabbit bursts out of the trees..." But the present tense doesn't mean past; it is merely used that way in certain contexts, for special purposes.)

So far in the book, there's been no mention of a passive voice. There is a form which indicates "indefinite subject", which seems to play a similar role, but the object remains the object (instead of being promoted to subject position, as in the usual passive).

Date: 2005-11-09 07:19 am (UTC)
filkferengi: (Default)
From: [personal profile] filkferengi
On the "running" question, change "have" to "had" for that nice, completed feeling.

:)

Date: 2005-11-09 10:24 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
Trouble is, the "past perfect" operates in the past. That is, it works from a previously-established "viewpoint moment" in the past - and at the time of that viewpoint moment, the action is not necessarily complete. Still no go, I'm afraid.

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