Transcript Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 41 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about tense and how different languages talk about time. But first, we are very excited to announce the launch of the Lingthusiasm LingComm Grant.

Gretchen: Yes. When we started this podcast, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could put some of our own money into the project to get us off the ground until our lovely patrons started coming in.

Lauren: Now we’re in a position where we want to pay it forward, and we want to help the next generation of awesome pop linguistics projects find their feet. We’re giving out a $500 US grant to a project that helps communicate linguistics to a new audience.

Gretchen: With your help, if we reach 800 patrons by May 1st, we can give out three of these grants. We’re really looking forward to seeing the applications come in. Applications are due June 1st. You can see more details about the LingComm grant and how to apply on our website. We’ll link to it from the show notes. It’s lingcomm.org – two Ms in “comm.”

Lauren: We know that some of you may be really passionate about the idea of there being more linguistics communication projects out in the world but don’t have the time or the expertise. If you really want to help support us in the LingComm grants, we’ve created a new tier at the Patreon called “Phil-ling-thropist.” For every person who supports us at $50.00 or more at that level, we’ll drop the number of patrons that we need to meet the three-grant goal down by 10. You will be as effective at 10 other patrons.

Gretchen: Don’t feel like you need to do this, but if you’re somebody who has a real job and this isn’t a lot of money to you, then this is an interesting thing to do with it. We’ll also send you a Lingthusiast mug after three months at this tier, so you can share your lingthusiasm that way.

Lauren: Of course, patrons at any level will help us meet the 800-patron goal to give out three grants.

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Lauren: Speaking of the stuff at the Patreon, we now have a Discord server for all our Ling-thusiast and above tiers, which is the first Discord server I’ve ever been on. I’m learning a lot.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to see people join so quickly because there’re actually a lot of people who are already joined and are chatting about things like interesting linguistics links that you come across, conlanging, learning languages, linguistics memes – we even have a channel where you can talk to each other in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was a fun challenge – and other interesting linguistics things that you come across around the internet.

Lauren: Lots of different channels. All very lingthusiastic – typing, chat. I feel like it definitely has an old-days-of-the-internet-user-group vibe that makes me really happy.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to start hanging out there. I think people are really enjoying that. Join us in the Discord!

Lauren: Our current bonus for patrons is bonus content from our interview with Janelle Shane in which we walk through creating a Lingthusiasm bot that generates Lingthusiasm transcripts. We walked through that in detail, and then we read some of our favourites.

Gretchen: If you would like to hear what Lingthusiasm would sound like if it were written by a neural net who is very enthusiastic but doesn’t really know that much about actual linguistics but finds some keywords sometimes, you can check that out. Definitely stay tuned for the part towards the end where we prompt the neural net with both Lingthusiasm and Harry Potter fan fiction. You get the most magical Lingthusiasm episode ever.

Lauren: This and 35 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, I’m gonna do some real-life sentence elicitation so we can look at some examples of how tense works with time. Are you ready if I give you a bit of a prompt?

Gretchen: Sure. Let’s go.

Lauren: Tell me about something that happened yesterday in the past.

Gretchen: I’m walking down the street yesterday, and I see this bird, right? This bird starts coming towards me.

Lauren: Okay. I am definitely gonna ask you about the rest of that story later, but for now, can I have an example of something that’s happening or could be happening right now in the present?

Gretchen: Well, let’s pretend that I’m not just literally recording this podcast with you because that’s a little bit too meta. Let’s say I’m just sitting at home right now, and I’m eating a delicious cake, and you’re drinking a cup of tea.

Lauren: Mmm. Right. I might need to go get a cup of tea. Before I do that, let’s have an example of something that is going to happen later in the future.

Gretchen: I’m going to the airport tomorrow, fly out to Rome at 10:00. We arrive the next morning, and then –

Lauren: Are you going to Rome tomorrow?

Gretchen: No. No, I’m not. It’s just the first place that I thought of. I’m not going anywhere.

Lauren: But, man, now I want a cup of tea and pizza.

Gretchen: One of the things that I think is really interesting about these examples is that because I’m a bit of your confederate in this experiment, shall I say.

Lauren: Yeah. This is not naturalistic data at all.

Gretchen: Because I’ve been briefed. One of the things that I was able to do is I was able to talk about something that happened yesterday and something that’s happening right now and something that is gonna happen tomorrow, but I was actually able to use the same forms of the verb for all of them. Let’s do a little rewind.

Lauren: Right. In the past, you used the verb –

Gretchen: “I’m walking down the street. I see this bird.”

Lauren: Present.

Gretchen: “I’m sitting at home. I’m eating a delicious cake.”

Lauren: Future.

Gretchen: “I’m going to the airport. We fly out to Rome.”

Lauren: I think the answer is that the relationship between tense and time is not as straightforward as we might think it is. We don’t have a past tense that is always used with past events.

Gretchen: Right. Normally, if you’re in a Ling 101 class and we’re talking about tense – or you’re in a language class and you’re talking about tense – and the definition that everyone gives about tense is, “Well, it means time.” It kind of does, but it also kind of doesn’t. This is the complexity that we’re gonna be trying to unravel for the rest of this episode.

Lauren: We have something that’s happening with grammar. We’re gonna call that tense. We have something that is happening with the flow of time that’s in the real world – where there is language being spoken or not – time is still ticking on. I mean, we’ve talked about how to conceptualise time in an earlier episode, but just thinking about the flow of time and then tense as a grammatical construct that relates to it but doesn’t perfectly map onto it.

Gretchen: What I was able to do in this experiment is I was able to use the English present tense to talk about actions in the past, and in the present, and in the future. What’s interesting is that – so English has another tense, which is the past tense, and I can’t quite do all three of these things with the past tense.

Lauren: Give me an example of the future with the past tense.

Gretchen: “I sat at home right now” is problematic. That has some tension there. It gets really tricky if I wanna say, “I went to the airport tomorrow.” That – hmm, no.

Lauren: I definitely don’t have that as a valid utterance in this real world, no time travelling sense of how language works.

Gretchen: Putting time travel aside, this is not how English works. Many linguists talk about English as having two tenses – past and non-past. What this means is that the non-past tense is the one that I can use to talk about any time space and the past tense I can only use to talk about the past. That’s why I’m able to say, “I walked down the street yesterday,” but not, “I sat at home right now” or “I went to the airport tomorrow” because the past tense is really restricted but the non-past tense can be in any of these times.

Lauren: It also speaks to something that I think sometimes people find a bit confronting about studying linguistics, which is that the way that they’re taught the idea of grammar in English language classes or in grammar classes is that we have a past, present, and future. But from a linguistic analysis, English is treated as a language with a past and non-past distinction. The non-past includes present and future constructions.

Gretchen: And sometimes this weird version of the past that’s used for storytelling purposes. Many kinds of past in English you do actually wanna use the past tense, but there’s this one very specific storytelling thing where you can use the present – or more accurately, the non-past – even in something that happened in the past to make it seem more vivid and more relevant to a particular current time. You’d have a harder time saying something like, “The Norman conquest of English happens in 1066.” That would be a harder sell for English. You’d really wanna say, “happened,” there. You could say, I guess, “William the Conqueror comes across the English Channel, right? And he’s got this big ship.” There, you’re using the present to make it very vivid.

Lauren: I feel so much more compelled when you use that present in past.

Gretchen: That makes it seem very vernacular, very storytelling-y. I’m doing this casual thing where you’re not gonna see that in a traditional history textbook, but you might see it in a fun, vivid history podcast type thing.

Lauren: I was kind of surprised when I took an English grammar linguistics subject just how many different grammatical constructions around tense there are in the English because I had this very simple idea that there was a past, present, future – done, done, done – and it’s like, “Ah, this is why the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is such a massive book” because I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the tense that you use in that narrative past using the present form is – the time is in the past but the tense is not just using a past tense.

Gretchen: This is why it’s useful to have – why not just call it “time” if tense just means “time”? Why not just say “time”? Well, it’s because there’s actually this difference in that the tense refers to specifically a thing that is done in the shape of a language can be somewhat independent from what’s actually going on in the world that you’re referring to, as in the case where you use the present to talk about the past. It doesn’t somehow make it the past. What about the future? Because, Lauren, it seems like English, we can definitely talk about the future.

Lauren: There are forms that I can talk about like, “I will go” – well, I won’t go to Rome – but “I will go to Rome tomorrow” or “I’m going to go to Rome tomorrow.” I can do that for “tomorrow” in a way that I can’t do it for “yesterday.” There’s something happening there.

Gretchen: The analysis of this in English is that “will” and “gonna” are treated like other types of things where you can add these sort of semi-verbs. If I wanted to say, “I can go to Rome,” “I might go to Rome,” “I wanna go to Rome,” “I have to go to Rome,” “I will go to Rome,” “I’m gonna go to Rome” – all of these are the category of “modals,” but we’re not gonna get into the terminology here – all of this category of, “Here’s this additional word that you can add that adds this additional information.” Sometimes, that’s a time-related piece of information. But sometimes that has to do with desires or possibilities or other types of additional meaning. That’s not how English talks about tense. English tense generally is something that’s part of the verb itself, whereas this is this additional word that gets added. It’s less obligatory in the future because it’s a lot more legit to say, “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I will fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I’m gonna fly to Rome tomorrow.” All of these are pretty good. Whereas, this case of “I’m walking down the street yesterday” is really this very one limited context. With “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” there’s a lot more places where you can use that. You don’t have to do this thing with “will.” You have these other options like “gonna” or just using the non-past form of the verb.

Lauren: There’s something about obligatoriness when it comes to tense.

Gretchen: It kind of reminds me of – remember the episode where we talked about evidentiality and how some languages you have to indicate the source of evidence that you have for something and other languages you can indicate the source of evidence, but you don’t have to?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There’s this similar thing going on with tense where, in some contexts, you have to indicate this piece of time information – or in some languages – and in other contexts you don’t have to indicate this time information.

Lauren: For English, it’s a language where evidentiality is completely optional. You can add some words to express a phenomenon. Then tense, especially with the past/present distinction, is obligatory.

Gretchen: Mostly obligatory. I think everything is a continuum, right?

Lauren: Yeah. I definitely am always wary of anyone who has discrete and absolute categories for things because every time you’re like, “It’s obligatory,” you’ll find a context in English like that narrative present where you’re like, “Oh, no! It’s broken my brain.” Whereas, if you take a “Let’s just look at what the language is doing and build up our analysis,” it causes a lot less existential anxiety.

Gretchen: That’s the other thing about looking at what a language is doing is that it’s often useful to look at it internally based on whatever this language does in really unambiguous cases where it’s tense. That’s what we can use as our diagnostic for these more ambiguous cases. If English didn’t have past tense either, then maybe we would say that “will” was a future tense. But because English does this thing with suffixes generally or irregular forms of the verb to be past, then we can say, “Well, ‘will’ is clearly doing that’s different from that and it seems like it makes more sense if we group ‘will’ in with ‘can’ and ‘might’ and ‘should,’ rather than grouping ‘will’ in with the past ‘-ed’ ending.

Lauren: I think that’s fair enough to start with the examples of what we have that are people are very strongly expressing their reliable feelings about the grammar – and work up from there. There’s a quote that says this really pithily, which is, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” which is from Roman Jakobson in a 1959 book.

Gretchen: That’s really pithy because it lets us say, “Well, languages can all talk about time or they can all talk about sources of evidence but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have tense or they all have evidentiality because those are the grammatical reflexes of those things in the real world.”

Lauren: Just as we talked about English not having grammatical evidentiality, we have languages that don’t have grammatical marking of tense. The thing I find interesting about these examples is when we don’t have something – English speakers are like, “Well, of course we can get by without evidentiality,” and then it’s a bit more of a leap for someone who’s used to speaking a language with grammatical tense imagining speaking a language without one. But if a language must convey something with tense, that’s gonna be very different to being able to talk about time more generally – without it being part of the grammar.

Gretchen: Because even if a language doesn’t have specific things that only do tense stuff, they’re gonna have words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “in the future” or “in the past” or something like that. That’s still gonna let you convey that. It’s similar, again, to doing number on words. We have “dog” and “dogs” in English but we could also just have “one dog” and “two dog” and “many dog” and we would still be able to convey that information even though we wouldn’t have the specific, additional grammatical thing that’s conveying that information.

Lauren: Languages like Vietnamese and Thai and Mandarin and Burmese all don’t have these grammatically obligatory markers. People will, if they need to in context, use words in much the same way in English we talk about tomorrow or later or whatever. They don’t have that same obligatory verb marking.

Gretchen: I think that there’s a Latin-based prejudice that a lot of – especially the European tradition of approaching language which is like, “Well, if it’s not a prefix or a suffix, it’s not grammar.” That’s not what we’re saying because you could have a short little word – Mandarin, for example, has a question particle that you just put in sentences to make them a question. That’s a grammatical feature. English doesn’t have an obligatory extra word to add to questions just to make them questions. That’s a case where you do have something that’s obligatorily grammatical. So, it’s not saying that there aren’t other obligatory grammatical features that you can do even if your language is a bunch of short words rather than fewer, longer words, but it’s, “Is this obligatory?” “Is this something that you have to add to something?”

Lauren: If we had to say “now” in English any time we talked about the present, then that’s as much a choice of grammar because of its obligatoriness not just because it’s something that sticks on the end of a verb.

Gretchen: One interesting example that came up for me recently when it came to languages having tense is Scottish Gaelic, which is a language that I studied briefly when I was in middle school and then I’ve been returning to because they added Scottish Gaelic to Duolingo and, you know, it’s a language. Something that’s interesting about Scottish Gaelic is that it kind of doesn’t really for the most part have a present tense.

Lauren: Ah, interesting. So, you can obviously, once you start thinking about each language has a different way of approaching segmenting time up into grammatical tenses, it can be interesting to look across languages as to how they segment them. Vietnamese doesn’t segment time up into any specific grammatical tenses. And then a language like Scottish Gaelic has – it has a future and a past? Is that what happens?

Gretchen: Well, the thing that makes me hedge it a lot and say, “kind of doesn’t really,” is because the only verb that has a present tense form is “to be.”

Lauren: Okay. That’s a big one.

Gretchen: Right. It’s a really important verb and it does a whole lot of stuff. Then, all of the other verbs have future forms and past forms, and then they also have – and this is where you get a little bit tricky – they also have forms like the sort of de-verbal noun form. If you have a verb like “see,” there’s no just “I see.” That’s not a thing you can say in Scottish Gaelic. Irish, I think, works differently. So, I’m not talking about Irish. I don’t know how Irish works.

Lauren: I’m trying really hard to not respond with “Hm, I see.”

Gretchen: You can say things like, “I am,” in Gaelic but you can’t just say, “I see.” What you want to say instead if you’re talking about the present is “I am seeing.”

Lauren: Because you are using the “be” verb to do the present heavy lifting.

Gretchen: Exactly. You can say, “I am seeing,” “I was seeing,” “I will be seeing,” and this all uses the same form of “seeing,” which is the noun-y form – the same one that you could use for something like “Seeing is great.” Then, you also have separate forms of the verb “to see,” which mean “will see” and “saw.” In the future, you can say, “I will be seeing” or “I will see.” And in the past, you can say, “I saw,” or “I was seeing.” But in the present, all you have is “I’m seeing.” There’s no just “I see.”

Lauren: It’s a bit like the English future in terms of obligatoriness being a slightly squishy concept.

Gretchen: Right. Obligatoriness is slightly different, and this is why. It kind of has a present because “to be” conjugates everywhere in all of the different forms. It’s also weird because “have,” which you might think is also a pretty basic verb, is expressed in Gaelic by saying something is “at” someone. If I say, “I have a cat,” I would say something like, “A cat is at me.” That’s how I say “have.” Again, you can just use “be” to convey “have” because it’s got this idiomatic construction. This was something that confused me when I was first learning Gaelic in middle school because they only taught us the verb “to be.” They taught it to us in a whole bunch of tenses and stuff, and they taught us these forms like “will be seeing” and “was seeing” and “am seeing” – all with the same one form. It was like, “Guys, I just – are you gonna teach us any other verbs at some point rather than just this one ‘seeing’ form? Surely there are more verbs in this language.”

Lauren: You were going into it with your English speaker category expectations.

Gretchen: Right. On the one hand, being an English speaker gave me an advantage because English also does this in a lot of contexts, right? English often says something like, “I am seeing” or “I am eating” or “I am walking down the street,” rather than “I walk down the street” or “I eat” or “I see.” English does this more than a lot of European languages. Some people have proposed that English does this thing because of influence from Scottish Gaelic, and this link has not been proven, so it is probably not actually true. It would be a fun hypothesis if it was true, but it’s not. English does do something similar just not quite as robustly. It was really confusing to me because I was coming from having learned French, where I was given all of these verb forms, and then they were trying to keep it easy for the Gaelic learners and just give us the minimum stuff you need because you really can get very far with only “to be.”

Lauren: We’ve seen some languages with a couple of tense distinctions like English or Scots Gaelic. We’ve seen languages with no tense distinctions. If we go the other way, we can look at languages that have multiple tense distinctions beyond what we see in languages like English. They segment that passage of time up into much smaller categories.

Gretchen: Yes! I love more tenses.

Lauren: Once you see this, you’re like, “We are really underperforming in the tense category department.”

Gretchen: It’s always really exciting to see something you don’t have and you’re like, “Ooo!”

Lauren: The examples I’ve always heard of have come from the area of Papua New Guinea, which just has wonderful levels of language diversity.

Gretchen: Papua New Guinea has, like, a sixth of the languages in the world, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Like, 1000 languages.

Lauren: Islands and mountains all do great things for linguistic diversity. Tifal is a language of Papua New Guinea in the Ok family. It has at least six tense distinctions. There is a present tense. Then, there is a “yesterday” past, a distant past, and a very remote past. Then, going the other way, there is a near future and a distant future.

Gretchen: Very nice. I like it.

Lauren: These are all distinct suffixes that are added to the verb to indicate the time relative to now of something that you’re talking about.

Gretchen: Again, it’s one of those things where there are ways of saying this in English but they’re not as obligatory or as directly encoded in some sort of obligatory thing. You can always say, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Or sometimes people make this distinction between “will” and “gonna.” But you don’t have this robust way of distinguishing between these different – you know, remote past and just simple past.

Lauren: If I talk about when I was in school, I’m probably using the distant past rather than the “yesterday” past. Context does a lot of heavy lifting and we often don’t give it enough credit when it comes to things like marking time.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, because you might, in some contexts, talk about when I was in school as the recent past because you’re contrasting that with something that happened 1000 years ago. Then, in other contexts, you might talk about it as the remote past if you’re talking with somebody who graduated last year.

Lauren: A language may have particular grammatical categories but sometimes, when you look at how they’re used, there’re particular conventions. I don’t know specifically for Tifal, but it may be that the very remote past is only used for origins and legends and myths and those kind of things. They’re not for the time that humanity has been living like they are now. There’s multiple things happening here. There’s the tense marking – it’s how it fits with actual time. Then, there are also genre conventions like we talked about with the English narrative past that uses the present.

Gretchen: Right. Again, even if you have a language where there’s a tense that indicates this myth and legend type past, it’s like how in English you use “once upon a time” to signal that something’s a fairy tale, but you can also use “once upon a time” to signal that you’re talking about something as if it’s a fairy tale. When you say, “Once upon a time, these two linguists got together and started a podcast,” this doesn’t mean that it’s a myth, but it’s we’re talking about Lingthusiasm’s origin story as if it were a myth using the myth frame even though, yes, very clearly this happened in a fathomable past where we were actually there and it’s not like Cinderella where it’s a fairy tale story.

Lauren: Context and genre are really important when we’re thinking about how language is used as well as the abstracted structure of it.

Gretchen: I think it’s neat to emphasise how these different types of tenses can be subverted so that there’s a canonical use and then there’s a playful use where you could put something as if it’s in that space as well. We talk about tense as “It’s time,” but it’s not always, strictly speaking, “time.” Another thing that comes up a lot when you talk about tense is other relationships that people could have to time. Sometimes, you talk about something as being an ongoing thing, or you talk about something as happening at one discrete point, or you talk about certain attitudes that you have towards whether something is happening or not. Those are generally lumped into different categories like mood and aspect, which can relate to tense but aren’t exactly the same thing as tense. I think we have to save those for another episode.

Lauren: We’ve already talked about evidentiality, which is often lumped into those categories. We’re talking about tense now. We’ve still got aspect and modality to look forward to.

Gretchen: Stay tuned for more things about how we think about time. But this one is just about where it is with respect to the personal timeline.

Lauren: Once you start looking at the variation, and you’re like, “Oh, I would like three past tense distinctions.” Another thing that would be very nifty is a grammatical tense that is specifically for the current day. If we want to give it a Latinate category, the hodiernal tense, from Latin for “today.” It’s always so much fancier when you say it in Latin, for real.

Gretchen: I know! It’s really fun. I always try to not get too bugged down on the terminology, but then sometimes learning that there’s actually a fancy terminological word for something is the most delightful part. You can have a hodiernal tense.

Lauren: Hodiernal tense is in Mwera, which is a Bantu language of Tanzania. And apparently, Gretchen, the passé composé in French in the 17th Century was possibly used as hodiernal.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s neat. So, passé composé in French, if you were to literally translate into English, it’s like putting “have” before all of your past verbs. Things like, “I have written,” “I have gone,” “I have seen,” “I have walked,” except it’s used in French as a general past. You would say something like, “I have walked,” when in English you would say, “I walked.” There is this other form in French that’s equivalent to “I walked” which is only used in literature now. It’s not used in ordinary conversations or even in casual writing. It’s one of those cases where something starts out as this restricted, casual, only “today” or something tense, and then it gets gradually expanded into being used as a default, unmarked past tense. Then, the other one becomes literary.

Lauren: Also a good reminder that the role of tenses aren’t fixed and static forever. Language is always changing, and evolving, and maybe one day English will have something we can call a definite grammatical future just in the way that French, for a brief period in the 17th Century, may have had hodiernal tense for a while.

Gretchen: That is neat. Certain words that start out as being very concrete can achieve this level of grammaticalisation. This is a thing that I really enjoy about grammaticalisation because when words become used grammatically, they often also get shorter. The original form, the concrete one, can’t necessarily shorten the same way as the grammatical one. Here’s an example – you can’t say, “I’m gonna the airport.”

Lauren: No. That does not sit with me.

Gretchen: You can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport.”

Lauren: Yes. That’s fine.

Gretchen: You think of “going to” and “gonna” as being equivalent to each other. They kind of are, but not in the literal sense. If I’m like, “I’m gonna the airport,” uhhhh… something’s broken – doesn’t work. Whereas, you can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport,” “I’m gonna fly to Rome,” or something like this, but you can’t do it in that bit. The same with “will,” which starts out meaning something like “want” or “wish” before it went to future.

Lauren: As in, like, a legal will?

Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly.

Lauren: Like, a thing that you write. Yeah.

Gretchen: But when it refers to the future, it can get shorted into “-ll,” as in “I’ll” or “you’ll” or something like this. But you can’t have “my last’ll and testament.”

Lauren: I think my brain got broken by trying to think of – that does not work, no.

Gretchen: No. It just doesn’t work. Even though “will” starts out as meaning “want” or “wish,” this “-ll” bit, that can only be used in a tense sort of way. Maybe that’s where – if we develop a future tense in English – that’s where it will develop. That would be interesting because that would be putting future tense on “I” and “you” and other pronouns rather than putting it on the verb like we currently do.

Lauren: There is definitely cases where we have tense being on things other than the verb in other languages. English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. But when you’re used to thinking about tense as being a feature of the verb and being marked somewhere very close to the verb, it is definitely – English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. One example of a language that can do this is Kaiadilt, which is an Australian language. If you wanted to have a difference between the sentence, “I will go to the beach” and “I went to the beach,” you mark it with a suffix on the noun “beach.”

Gretchen: So, “I go to the present beach,” “I go to the future beach,” “I go to the former beach”?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess you can do this in some restricted contexts in English. You can say, “My former teacher” or “the late Mr. So-and-So,” or “This is an ex-parrot,” and that can refer to something that is no longer whatever the thing is.

Lauren: These are suffixes that go onto the noun in the way that we think of tense suffixes going onto a verb.

Gretchen: Right. But these are specifically talking about – it’s not that it’s not a beach anymore.

Lauren: No. It is still very much an existing, ongoingly, beach.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. It’s just that I’m not there anymore. Okay. Sometimes, we talk about language being constrained by the biological laws of human anatomy. There’re certain sounds we can make, there’re certain sounds we can’t make. There’re certain ways we can configure our hands. There’re certain ways we can’t configure our hands. Sometimes, we talk about language as being constrained by the fact basically all of its speakers of human languages are on this pale blue dot that’s revolving around the sun, and we have words for days and years because we all share this as part of the human experience. I think maybe another element of this is talking about languages being constrained by physics. We don’t have any natural human languages that have words for the tenses involved in time travel because time travel, so far, is not a thing, so none of the languages have had to develop them. But, in theory, this could happen.

Lauren: This would be very difficult to approach as an English speaker because, as we’ve demonstrated in this episode, one of the ways we test the obligatoriness and the grammaticality of tense as opposed to talking about time is to check people’s intuitions because if something’s obligatory, then removing it or changing it should change people’s intuitions. If you’re talking about using past tense, we expect that events that are bounded by the past can’t be interacted with in the same way as events that will happen in the future. We use that as part of our intuition building. Can you imagine, Gretchen, how much linguistic theory would be broken if suddenly a whole bunch of sentences could be valid because people could time travel?

Gretchen: Right. So, saying something like, “I was there tomorrow” or “I will be there yesterday” – suddenly, maybe you need to be able to do this because you’ve time travelled.

Lauren: The Cambridge Grammar of English is already big enough, and this is my main argument against time travel.

Gretchen: It’s already, like, 2000 pages, and if it’s time travel, we’d need to double the size of the tense chapter.

Lauren: It’s gonna be a lot of work. It could be fun though.

Gretchen: I think it could keep linguists employed for a long time figuring out how to do this.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. To listen to bonus episodes, join our Discord chatroom, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include a special neural net generated episode of Lingthusiasm – where we read out the results of the neural net – the future of English, and onomatopoeia. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is Ancient City by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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