atw: Re: Particular past tense

My two cents worth.
I think that people sometimes add words to a sentence to make them sound more 'intelligent' and 'important'. Perhaps this is part of the reasoning behind it (not detracting from other peoples input).
An example of this was in Victorian England where people would add words to make themselves sound more upper miiddle class. So expressions like "terribly nice to meet you", "frightfully interesting". 

Though this is slightly different issue, you get the point.



Andrew





----Original Message Follows----
From: "Michael Lewis" <mlewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "austechwriter list" <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Subject: atw: Re: Particular past tense
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:38:04 +1000

Daryl Colquhoun:

> Oh dear. Sorry about that mishap with the previous post.

Ain't technology grand?  8-)

> . . . It seems the "present perfect continuous",
> according to the websites, is what we get when we deploy that bane of
> English learners, the present participle, thus, *"The driver has been losing > control of his truck and he's been ending up in a creek". Which is plainly 
> not possible here. It works in something like "I've been studying this
> question all night". And it's different from the plain present perfect;
> compare "I've washed my car as long as I've owned it" with the somewhat
> silly "I've been washing my car as long as I've owned it".

But "I've been washing my car every Saturday as long as I've owned it" isn't
so silly.
> I take Michael's point about perfect and continuous being a dichotomy, but 
> I've always called this construction with the present participle
> "continuous". So this isn't really perfect? Because it's still happening?
> (In which case I suppose the websites are just simplifying.)
Indeed, those constructions are not "perfect". We're getting caught up in the 
problem that grammatically we have to contend with three different points on
the time line -- the time of speaking, the time of the event we are speaking
of, and (sometimes) the time of some other "reference" event. "I will have
been writing this book for over three years" is referring to some point that
is in the future at the time of speaking; at that point some other activity
will be seen to have started more than three years previously. Whether the
writing activity will be complete at that future point is not made clear, but certainly the process up to that point is being presented as having some sort 
of continuity. Similarly with "I had been working on that book for more than
three years", which is referring to some point that is in the past at the time 
of speaking.

We can express the continuous aspect of past tense in at least two ways: "I
was doing" and "I have [or had] been doing". I can't think of any way of
distinguishing between them by means of simple grammatical labels -- that's
just one more component of the price we pay for trying to describe a Germanic 
language using a system that was developed for Latin. But neither of them is
perfect aspect; for that, we need "I have [or had] done".

- Michael

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