The 5th Annual Clarion Write-a-thon
10 years ago
Saturday, March 12, 2011
time adverbials
I don't remember how I stumbled across it, but I found the SFMTA page a couple weeks ago, and was interested in a completely ordinary construction on their home page, namely that their railway "today carries over 200 million customers per year". If we take the more narrow meaning of "today" as the day of the utterance, this sentence is nonsensical. You can't have a certain number of customers per year carried on a single day. But of course that's not how we actually interpret the sentence. Here we use "today" in a more general, perhaps not quite metaphorical sense, simply to mean the current relevant time. That could be limited to the actual day in question, but it could also be a month, a year, or a millenium -- we could also say "today the planet has significantly lower oxygen levels than during the Cretaceous", and we'd be talking about the current geological era. This type of coercion is extremely common in English, though it isn't possible in every language. We're quite willing to reinterpret the semantics of a verb or time adverbial in order to make the sentence interpretable. The predicate "reach the summit" is a classic example of what is typically called an achievement, a predicate that happens all at once. You've either reached the summit or you haven't; there's nothing in between. But we're perfectly happy to say "they reached the summit in twenty minutes", because we attach a preparatory process that consists of the stages coming immediately before actually reaching the summit (hiking, climbing, etc.).
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Thanks for sharing that. What really is interesting though is the fact you won’t find the definition for ‘’past time adverbial’’ in grammar reference books as if it didn’t exist. What about phrases such as ‘’in the past’’ or ‘’in the past months’’? Instead, in examples you’ll find constructions such as ‘’recently’’ or ‘’in the last couple of months’’ almost avoiding the use of word ‘’past’’ and these are normally accompanied by… Present Perfect tense e.g. ‘’I haven’t taken any pictures in the last couple of days’’ but they wouldn’t say ‘’I haven’t taken any pictures in the past’’ because then it should really be said in Past Simple tense. So… Is there even such a thing as past time adverbial? I'm sorry for my rambling, I've been wondering about this non-existent past time adverbials phenomena for quite some time now!
@Ewelina
"I haven't taken any pictures in the past" can be said, but that construct tends to imply a contrast with the present (or perhaps the future), or a possible change.
For example, one wouldn't say "I haven't taken pictures in the past." But one might say "I haven't taken any pictures in the past, but if you really need me to do it, I can."
Past time adverbials may be rarer because English seems to have what's often called a past/non-past system. Utterances unambiguously refer to whether or not an event happened in the past. Note that this is not true with respect to future. We can say "I'm going to the store" meaning literally the progressive, i.e., I'm currently in the process of going, or we can mean it to mean that I'm going in the future (often with a future time adverbial like "later" or "tomorrow"). "I haven't taken any pictures in the past" is fine for me, especially with context like "...because I haven't been able to afford to buy a good camera." In some languages, like Lakota, past time adverbials are the only way to unambiguously show that an event occurred in the past (Lakota has a future/non-future system with no true past tense marker).
@Ryan
I'm confused by your phrase "they reached the summit twenty minutes", which appears to me to be nonsense... or perhaps it's missing a preposition, like "in".
Sorry for the typo, that should indeed be "in 20 minutes".
Thanks guys for your answers. I still think that in a perfect world, grammar should distinguish so-called past time adverbials and these would only be ever used with simple past and never with present perfect. Otherwise, what is the difference between simple past and present perfect? I know grammar books explain perfect present with the very mysterious time span between this particular point in the past and now while the past simple is used to talk about actions in the past that have finished (or perhaps finished?). In other words it talks about ‘’then’’ and not ‘’now’’. I know this but it is indeed very confusing. Remember that British and American English have different rules for the use of the present perfect as well and this doesn’t make it easier to grasp. How can a time concept differ from variation to variation of the same language is beyond me.
I'm not entirely convinced that you can't have a certain number of customers per year carried on a single day. If we take "customers per year" as a unit of measurement, then we certainly can compute the numbers (or fractions) of that unit on a certain day, just as we can have "pounds per square inch" over a fraction of an inch, or travel at twenty "miles per hour" for ten minutes.
"Eighty miles an hour?! Why, that's ridiculous, officer! I've only been driving for ten minutes!"
"They reached the summit" is not compatible with the time adverbial "for twenty minutes", even though you take into account that there are preparatory stages. So, I would say that expressions like "in twenty minutes", "in three years", do presuppose an obligatory end-point. Or was your point that you wanted to distinguish between accomplishments and achievements?
I start my first linguistics courses next semester, so I can't make an educated observation. I do not know what a past time adverbial is yet, nor do I think anyone will even see this post, given the parent post is from March. However, I don't see among the comments what to me is an obvious semantic interpretation of this sentence, which is:
"As of this day, the annual number of passengers we carry is 200 million."
What this says to me is that someone, likely in marketing, needed to stress ridership and scale. We are subtly encouraged to think that in the SF Munis hundred years of operation ridership has grown steadily to the number cited, and continues to grow. Ask a year from now, and you will get a different, larger number as taken on the day of measurement.
Unfortunately, the statement is ambiguous. If ridership were actually in decline, then our marketer would be attempting to assert relevance, rather than growth, eg: "We still carry 200 million passengers per year." As presented, the sentence works either way.
In other words, the word "today" is likely being used purposely by someone skilled at suggesting more than what they are saying, and perhaps trying to avoid saying too much. As a future linguist who needs to target a specialty, I would welcome someone pointing me in the right direction. What linguistic specialty deals with this sort of topic?
Tom: most of the content of the original post is in the field of semantics, which looks at what we know when we know what words mean. When you talk about someone meaning more than they're saying, that would fall more in the field of pragmatics, which looks at how language is used in context, and how we understand someone when they mean something other than what they are literally saying.
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