More on Verbs
Lat night superversive came up with the sort of speculation about the linguistic threads of the tapestry of language that made sense to me. Many wouldn't see it, so with permission, here it is up front.
From superversive:
I agree with you, Sherwood, and after much noggin-scratching and segashuating, I can even say roughly why:
Past progressive is a useful tense, but not that useful; it simply is not competent to carry an extended narrative all by itself. The reason is rooted deep in linguistic structures that most of us, alas, don’t even know the names of.
Verb tense doesn’t matter half as much as most of our English teachers taught us. What matters much more is verb aspect. Most people don’t even know that verbs have aspects. Luckily we don’t need to, for we all use them every day, intuitively, habitually, and nearly always correctly. You can write a narrative in the historic present as easily as in the past tense, but you desperately need verbal signals to distinguish actions in progress, actions completed, and general states of being. I have read that Proto-Indo-European didn’t even bother to distinguish between past, present, and future; but it had very neat and specific distinctions between imperfective, perfective, and aorist. Tenses are secondary and evolved later in the various daughter languages.
Whatever tense you use, you will want all three of these aspects to tell a decent story. Consider:
Imperfective aspect: Mary Sue was beating her head against the wall.
Perfective aspect: Mary Sue beat her head against the wall.
Aorist aspect: Mary Sue beats her head against walls.
These three sentences say quite different things about Mary Sue and her habits. It would be easy to cast them in either the past or present tense, or even the future, and the meaning would not be changed, only the timing of the events described. But if you try to tell the whole story in the imperfect aspect, you can only describe one of these three kinds of events. You can’t talk about anything that ends or happens instantaneously, or specify that something is normally or habitually true. You can only talk about incomplete actions that are going on at various times. Yes, you can work around these problems by the clever deployment of simple past, past perfect, and pluperfect tenses, but that makes a lot of extra work for the reader.
Why take all that trouble when you can express everything so much more easily and clearly by using all three aspects in a natural way? The only reason that leaps to mind is to show that you are an Artiste and a Stylist and can write in a Picturesque and Arresting Way. I’m sure there are Creative Writing profs who get all warm and gushy over this kind of affectation. Readers, generally speaking, don’t. The last thing we want is to be arrested. We trust that the story will be something more than a series of snapshots of events in progress; that at some point something will finish and be cast into a good solid perfective aspect. And in English, that is a job for the past indicative. Eschew it at your peril.
From superversive:
I agree with you, Sherwood, and after much noggin-scratching and segashuating, I can even say roughly why:
Past progressive is a useful tense, but not that useful; it simply is not competent to carry an extended narrative all by itself. The reason is rooted deep in linguistic structures that most of us, alas, don’t even know the names of.
Verb tense doesn’t matter half as much as most of our English teachers taught us. What matters much more is verb aspect. Most people don’t even know that verbs have aspects. Luckily we don’t need to, for we all use them every day, intuitively, habitually, and nearly always correctly. You can write a narrative in the historic present as easily as in the past tense, but you desperately need verbal signals to distinguish actions in progress, actions completed, and general states of being. I have read that Proto-Indo-European didn’t even bother to distinguish between past, present, and future; but it had very neat and specific distinctions between imperfective, perfective, and aorist. Tenses are secondary and evolved later in the various daughter languages.
Whatever tense you use, you will want all three of these aspects to tell a decent story. Consider:
Imperfective aspect: Mary Sue was beating her head against the wall.
Perfective aspect: Mary Sue beat her head against the wall.
Aorist aspect: Mary Sue beats her head against walls.
These three sentences say quite different things about Mary Sue and her habits. It would be easy to cast them in either the past or present tense, or even the future, and the meaning would not be changed, only the timing of the events described. But if you try to tell the whole story in the imperfect aspect, you can only describe one of these three kinds of events. You can’t talk about anything that ends or happens instantaneously, or specify that something is normally or habitually true. You can only talk about incomplete actions that are going on at various times. Yes, you can work around these problems by the clever deployment of simple past, past perfect, and pluperfect tenses, but that makes a lot of extra work for the reader.
Why take all that trouble when you can express everything so much more easily and clearly by using all three aspects in a natural way? The only reason that leaps to mind is to show that you are an Artiste and a Stylist and can write in a Picturesque and Arresting Way. I’m sure there are Creative Writing profs who get all warm and gushy over this kind of affectation. Readers, generally speaking, don’t. The last thing we want is to be arrested. We trust that the story will be something more than a series of snapshots of events in progress; that at some point something will finish and be cast into a good solid perfective aspect. And in English, that is a job for the past indicative. Eschew it at your peril.