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[Altair]

Much of the grammatical terminology we use seems to date from the grammarian Dionysus Thrax, who wrote in Greek in the second century BC, and later grammarians, like Priscian, who wrote in Latin around 500 AD.  If you take the terms too literally, however, you end up with nonsense.

 

For instance,  Dionysus defined three words: "rhema," "logos," and "lexis" differently.  To me, these all basically mean "word," yet Dionysus distinguished them as "verb," "sentence," and "word."  If you take the English descendants of these words, you get "rheme," "logos," and "lexis."  Respectively, these mean something like: "comment on an item of focus," "a philosophic term of various meanings surrounding discourse or divine speech," and "word stock."

 

For these same terms, Priscian used "verbum," "oratio," and "dictio," which all also basically mean "word."  If you use the English descendents of Priscian's terms, you end up with "verb," "oration," and "diction," which would give you the wrong idea of their intended meaning if you did not recognize them as terms of art with special meaning in this context.

 

Dionysus used the word "chronos" (ῥῆμά ἐστι λέξις ἄπτωτος, ἐπιδεκτικὴ χρόνων...) as the forerunner of our word tense.  Priscian used the word "tempus" in the same way (verbum est pars orationis cum temporibus et modis ....).  "Tempus" is indeed the ancestor of the English word "tense" as applied to verbs.  Dionysus and Priscian both used the word in the plural and with the meaning of "times" or "tenses." They were interested in explaining the patterning of verb endings that indicated various differences in the time reference.

 

Early grammarians like Dionysus and Priscian were mostly interested in explaining morphology and did not have much of an understanding of syntax as something separate.  As a result, their vocabulary is rather lacking in describing a language like Chinese in which morphology is almost wholly absent.  They did little to expand upon the idea of tense apart from what was necessary to distinguish the various patterns of endings.

 

It is also very common that descriptions of any particular language, like Ancient Greek or Latin, tend to use terms in a way that is particular to that language and that will be misleading if applied uncritically to another.  German, Chinese, and English are no exceptions to this.  For instance, grammars dealing with all three languages use the term "perfect(ive)" to refer to a particular verb usage, but none of the three languages has remotely the same usage.

 

What were originally called tenses in the general sense, involved what linguists would now divide among the concepts of aspect and tense in the narrow sense.  The separation of these concepts apparently began with the study of Slavic languages, which clearly distinguish between them.  In Slavic verbs, the endings indicate only tense; whereas prefixes (or the lack of them) are used to give aspectual information.  Slavic verbs come in pairs that differ according to aspect and the presence or lack of a prefix.  One member of the pair is used for imperfective uses, and the other for perfective ones.

 

I think the word "aspect" itself was a translation of a Slavic term of similar meaning.  I think the idea is that tense was thought to be determined by the objective place that a situation occupies on the timeline at the moment of speaking.  Aspect, however, is subject to the choice of how a speaker wants to describe a situation and the "aspect" or "view" of the situation they want to highlight.

 

My understanding of how linguists use the terms "tense" and "aspect" is  more or less exactly as how  陳德聰 explained above.  The only think I might add is that like other terms, such as "language," "word," and "sentence," these terms lack precision when talking about precise matters and linguists differ about what they actually cover.  My own opinion, based on reviewing several online theses and various reference grammars, is that the common understanding of "aspect" is actually flawed; but that is a discussion for another day and does not detract from the fact that the word "aspect" is a common term of art with an apparently clear reference in common linguistic discourse.

[陳德聰]

*slow clap*

[Pedroski]

Help me out with a translation then:

 

I look up Present Tense and get  现在时。You stated quite categorically that 'tense' is not 'time'. So I tried to enlighten you with an etymological insight. (Old French tens "time, period of time, era)

 

I hope you will agree that '现在‘ renders 'present' in this phrase. Where did they go wrong with 'tense'? What should it be,  and what, in your opinion is 'tense', if it is not 'time'?

 

When we have cleared up 'tense', we can talk some more about 'aspect', as long as we can agree on a definition first. I rather like the etymonline definition, but for clarity I would change it slightly: 'aspects: ways of viewing the same thing from different positions'

[陳德聰]

For definitions, please refer to posts #38, #40, and #41.

[Pedroski]

Present tense and present time are not the same thing.

 

 

If we can, as I strongly hope, assume, present = present, would you therefore say, the translation 现在时 is wrong?

[Altair]

 

Quote

Present tense and present time are not the same thing.

 

 

If we can, as I strongly hope, assume, present = present, would you therefore say, the translation 现在时 is wrong?

 

 

Both statements are correct.  "Tense" is a term of art that has a different meaning from "time."  The character 时 can be used to express both, depending on the context.  This is no different from what the ancient Greek and Latin grammarians did as I explained in my previous post.

 

The Chinese Wikipedia has: 时或时态(tense)在语法裡是表示行为发生的时间和说话时的关系。  To me, this strongly implies that 现在时 represents more or less the same concept as 现在时态.

 

In German, you might say Tempus or Zeitform as equivalents for different aspects of the word "tense" as a grammatical category and "tense" as a particular verb form.  The fact that one word can be used in English doesn't meant that the two German words mean the same thing.  Tempus is the grammatical category that is expressed by a particular verb's Zeitform.  Both terms are distinct from the everyday meaning of the word Zeit, which has pretty much the same meaning as the English word "time."

 

We should also not read too much into the literal meaning of the word "present."  The English "present tense" refers either to a particular morphological and syntactic paradigm or to a particular grammatical category or usage.  The paradigm and category are usually used with reference to actions or states that occur at the time of speech, and the word "present" was therefore chosen to describe them.

 

The paradigm that we call the "present tense" can be used in certain situations to express the past (e.g., as in a headline of the type "President Visits New Hospital") or the future (as in, "I am going on vacation next year"); however, we would use a different term to describe the usage in such cases (e.g., historical present).  The paradigm is one thing, and the usage is another, even if they share the same name.  Such situations are actually extremely common across languages.