More passive tense
As Geoff Pullum
has
just noted, on NPR's
Morning
Edition of 5/11/07, Steve Inskeep, interviewing U.S. Army Gen.
Dan McNeill, pursued
a question about current U.S. policy in Afghanistan:
Understanding that you're constrained
from criticizing an ally, let's put it in the passive tense:
Ok, a mistake. But
WHICH mistake is it:
passive tense for
passive voice (a mistake in
grammatical terminology, as Geoff thinks), or
passive
tense for
past tense
(a mistake in word retrieval)?
Inskeep goes on:
There was
a cease-fire agreement in southern Afghanistan with some members of the
Taliban at one time; is that something that you would pursue if the
opportunity came up?
The accent on the past tense form
was
(and the absence of anything that looks like a passive) suggests that
Inskeep was aiming for
past tense
and pulled out
passive
instead of
past -- an easy
mistake to make, since the words are phonologically similar and also
(both being grammatical terms) semantically similar. I am myself
given to saying
verb for
vowel, and vice versa; I'm not
confused about the concepts, just retrieving the wrong
v-initial technical term of
linguistics.
A few other examples of doubly motivated retrieval errors:
1.
suppletion analysis for
syncretism analysis, in a
Language
Log posting by me (twice); I have now corrected this.
2. ... a sort of postmodern quality to these mushrooms [
marshmallows] (Stanford Humanities
Center fellow, in lunch-table conversation, 1/20/06)
3. I presume "go yard" is intended to be elliptical for "go the
whole distance of the ballyard", or words to that extent [
effect]. (Ben Zimmer on
ADS-L, 10/15/05; he corrected himself in a later posting)
4. ... who actually agrees with the sentiment quoted, and
b'leeves that the same advice goes for communication with/at mr kingsix
of the idiomatic [
idiosyncratic]
punctuation (Chris Ambidge, posting on soc.motss, 9/21/05)
5.
air traffickers for
air travelers, in a press
conference by GWB, 4/3/07.
Other retrieval errors are mostly phonological in motivation (
pollution for
pollination, of flowering plants by
bees) or mostly semantic ("this particular noun [
consonant] cluster"). Some
are mostly phonological in motivation, but also have probable triggers
in the context: my "a preposition [
presentation]
of brutal masculinity", about gay porn, but not long after a discussion
of stranded prepositions; a friend's "a biological orgasm [
organism] that reproduces by...",
an error undoubtedly facilitated by planning for the word
reproduces.
Such errors suggest that the "mental lexicon" is organized according to
both phonological and semantic properties (as well as syntactic
properties: retrieval errors almost always preserve syntactic category)
and that retrieval is sensitive to the context in which language is
produced, in that errors can be facilitated by what's "in the mind" of
the speaker or writer.
But wait! There's more. This is not our first brush with
passive tense here at Language Log
Plaza. If you google on {"passive tense"}, you'll get a
distressingly large number of hits -- in the tens of thousands --
almost none of them (if any) for word retrieval errors; instead, there
are a few for lists of the tense forms of the passive voice in one
language or another (more on this below), but most of the hits are,
alas, for errors in grammatical terminology (
passive tense for
passive voice). And as the
top-ranked hit you'll probably get Geoff Pullum's earlier
plaint
about an occurrence of this error in
The Economist, where they really
should know better. Soon you'll get to Mark Liberman's
response
to someone asking for advice on "how to avoid passive tense".
Particularly distressing is the fact that so many of the errors in
grammatical terminology you google up are, omigod, on pages giving
advice to writers or students. A few examples:
Our editors find that one of the
greatest weaknesses of admissions essays is their frequent use of the
passive tense. For this mini-lesson you will learn ... (
link)
The passive tense is still used in some forms of academic writing. It
is best to become familiar with the type of writing style that is most
commonly used within a particular subject area. (
link)
[a particularly wonderful find, with two passive clauses and one
impersonal-subject clause]
Help your students identify sentences written in active or passive
tense with this entertaining deck. Students use the 28 pairs of
illustrated cards to ... (
link)
Avoid passive tense when possible because it is boring. ... A simple
way to check your paper for passive tense is to use the FIND command
... (
link)
At this point you suspect that an awful lot of people are using
tense to mean something like 'verb
form'. For the English passive even this isn't quite right, since
the passive isn't a verb form but a syntactic construction (most
commonly composed of a form of the verb
BE and a VP
with its head verb in the past participial form). But let that
pass. There are bigger things to worry about.
Look at English-Zone's "Active and passive tenses
chart".
English-Zone (which describes itself as "the BEST English-Learner's
site on the 'Net!") talks about active and passive
VOICE,
so there's
one problem avoided. The chart begins with the "simple present"
and the "simple past", for which the "forms" of the passive given are,
respectively:
am/is/are + past participle
was/were + past participle
This is already fairly silly, since it treats these forms as fresh
things to memorize. But really all the learner needs to know is
(a) that (more or less in English-Zone's terms) the passive is composed
of head verb
BE + past participle, and (b) that the
present forms of
BE are
am/is/are,
the past forms
was/were. Only the first of
these is new information for the learner.
The chart then continues in this vein, giving the "present and past
continuous (progressive)", "present and past perfect", and "future"
forms of the passive. These forms are entirely systematic, being
constructed on the basis of fact (a) and the principles governing the
corresponding forms of the active. English-Zone has managed to
turn a pretty simple system into a massive pile of unrelated formulas.
Put that aside, and note that this is supposed to be a chart of
TENSE
FORMS, where the tenses include: simple present, simple past,
present progressive, past progressive, present perfect, past perfect,
and future. They're all "tenses", presumably because their
associated meanings have some temporal component. This is not
some idiosyncrasy on English-Zone's part; such a use of
tense is all over the pedagogical
literature for English and dozens (if not hundreds) of other
languages, and it's not unknown among language professionals:
Watchers of the History Channel have
noticed its general taboo against use of the past and perfect
tenses. (Lexicographer Jonathan Lighter on ADS-L, 5/16/07)
Some treatments of English go on from the list above
to the future progressive, future perfect, present perfect progressive,
past perfect progressive, and future perfect progressive (in the
passive:
will have been being given!).
Linguists factor the grammatical categories into tense (for English,
present, past, sometimes future, but see below), having to do, in many
of its occurrences, with the
location of situations in time, and aspect (for English,
unmarked vs. perfect and progressive, with the possibility for these
latter two to co-occur), having to do, in many of its occurrences, with
the internal organization of
situations over time. There are then twelve possible
combinations, enumerated in the preceding paragraph.
Given this extended sense of
tense
in many quarters, it's probably no surprise that some people have
extended it to cover voice as well as tense and aspect.
There are two different extensions of careful technical vocabulary
here:
tense is extended to
cover all sorts of verbal categories (often realized by morphology on
the verb); and
form is
extended to cover
multi-word combinations -- periphrastic expressions -- as well as
single words. These extensions
are in principle independent of one another.
Extended sense of tense.
I am sorry to report that you can find references to infinitive,
conditional, subjunctive, negative, causative, permissive, inceptive,
plural, imperative -- Mark Liberman
complained
here about this one three years ago -- and interrogative tenses in one
language or another. No doubt there are many
more verbal categories that have been labeled "tenses", but I gave up
my search in sorrow after finding these.
What we have here is a terminological morass. The way out is to
distinguish different types of categories; these are customarily given
labels that suggest something about the semantics associated with each
type: tense, aspect, voice, mood, mode/modality, polarity, finiteness,
evidential status, and the like.
These types can be relevant for some languages and not for
others. For any particular language, within each type we
distinguish various forms belonging to that type, and those too
are customarily given labels that suggest something about the
associated semantics: present vs. past tense, for example.
All of this labeling is problematic: the "same" type in different
languages will cover rather different territory, and that's also true
of the "same" form in different languages; and within a single
language, almost all forms are multifunctional (associated with a
variety of meanings), so that choosing a
label for any particular form is a somewhat arbitrary process.
For these reasons, for some time I've been advocating assigning
arbitrary labels whenever we need to be absolutely clear about how a
language works; see my
posting
on the "subjunctive" in English for some development of this
proposal.
But for informal discussion of English (or any other language),
traditional labels will usually do. Still, they should be used
accurately. "Passive tense", "infinitive tense", and the like are
not accurate uses.
Extended sense of form. There are two motives for
extending the term
form to
multi-word combinations: semantic parallels between periphrastic and
inflectional realization in one language (for instance, between
periphrastic future
will see
and inflectional present
see(
s) and past
saw, and between periphrastic
to see and inflectional
seeing); and periphrastic
realization in one language corresponding to roughly equivalent
inflectional realization in another (for instance, the English passive
construction vs. the inflectional passive of many other languages,
among them Latin).
Both of these moves are unwise, because they take us down a slippery
slope. If we treat the expression of future time via the modal
will ("I will be your assistant")
as a tense, then why not say the same for the futurate quasi-modal
be going to ("I'm going to be your
assistant"), the future-plan modal
be
to ("I am to be your assistant"), and the inceptive future
quasi-modal
be about to ("I
am about to be your assistant")? And the future-in-past modal
would ("I would soon see why the
idea was problematic"). And we pick up at least two more past
tenses, expressed via the quasi-modal
used
to ("I used to be your assistant") and the modal
would ("When I was a child, I would
always help set the table").
Somewhat more subtly, if we're picking out tenses on the basis of
meaning, why don't we say that "I leave at noon tomorrow" and "I am
leaving at noon tomorrow" illustrate two more future tenses (rather
than saying that they are futurate uses of the present tense)?
And why don't we say that English has several more tenses -- for
instance, a gnomic tense, for (putatively) universal truths ("Ice melts
at 32 degrees F."), a narrative tense, as in "A panda walks into a
bar,...", and still others? The usual way people talk about these
phenomena is as "uses of the present tense", and that's basically
right. But how do we avoid calling these things different
"tenses" simply because they have different kinds of temporal reference?
In fact, calling the progressives and perfects of English "tenses"
follows from this identification of "tense X" with "meaning Y":
unmarked aspect in "I see you" (a state description) describes
something happening at the moment, but so does progressive aspect in "I
am jumping over an anthill" (an event description); unmarked aspect in
"I will go to Hawaii" describes a future event, but so does perfect
aspect in "By the time you arrive, I will have gone to Hawaii" (a past
in the future).
The multiplication of verbal categories will continue if we analyze
English on the basis of the inflectional categories of other languages,
where voice, mood (declarative, imperative, interrogative, subjunctive,
conditional, etc.), mode/modality (expressing necessity, obligation,
permission, possibility, likelihood, intention, and much more),
polarity (postive vs. negative), finiteness, evidential status, and
various other meaning ranges can be expressed via inflectional
morphology. Going down this road gives English at least one "verb
form" for each of its modal verbs, plus more for the constructions with
have to,
want to, (
've)
got to, (
had)
better, etc.; two passive "forms"
(for the
be and
get passives); a whole pile of
moods; and much more.
This is craziness. The way out that I favor is to split the
description of the data into two parts: an inventory of the
inflectional morphology of the language and an inventory of its
syntactic constructions. The forms in the inflectional inventory
are "bits of stuff" that can be used in the constructions ("grammatical
words" are another kind of stuff, and there are still other
kinds). Each construction is a set of conditions on the
composition of expressions -- think of the conditions, taken together,
as a recipe for putting a construction together -- associated with a
meaning for the construction as a whole.
Such an approach gets us down to two verb forms for English that can be
referred to, informally, as tenses; call them Form:R and Form:T.
They can be used in constructions with present-time meaning and
past-time meaning, respectively -- this is, in some sense, their
customary use -- but they can also be used in constructions with other
meanings, and the temporal-location meanings can be expressed by other
means.
This isn't the place to develop an analysis of English along
these lines -- I've probably strained your patience already -- but it
should be enough to show that we don't have to slide down that slippery
slope.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 25, 2007 04:59 PM