Re: Placement of aspect suffixes

[Terrence Donnelly <pag000@mail.connect.more.net>]

At 10:12 AM 2/22/99 -0800, charghwI' wrote:
>At one of the qep'a', Okrand said that early in the development 
>of the language, the suffix {-pu'} meant simple past tense, but 
>he decided it would be more interesting to have the language 
>lack tense, referring only to aspect. Unfortunately, it seems 
>that several of his "simple past" examples survived intact in 
>TKD.
>
>The point is that NOW the suffix {-pu'} refers to aspect, not 
>tense. When we tell stories in English, we almost always tell 
>them in the past tense. "Yesterday, I went there and he said 
>this, so I did that." There is a temptation to translate this 
>into something like {wa'Hu' pa' vIghoSpu' 'ej mu'meyvam jatlhpu' 
>'ej Qu'vetlh vIta'pu'.} Meanwhile, every single one of those 
>{-pu'} suffixes in that example is basically wrong. The time 
>stamp {wa'Hu'} took care of the past tense for the rest of that 
>compound sentence. You only want to mark a verb as perfective if 
>AT THE TIME INDICATED BY THE TIME STAMP OR SIMILAR CONTEXT, the 
>action WAS COMPLETE.

A trick I often use myself is to ask if the word 'already' is
appropriate, and if it is, I put the verb in perfective.  This
tends to do away with confusing aspect with tense, since it works
in any time frame: "I had already done..., I already did...,
I will have already done..."

-- ter'eS