Languary Day Ten: T-A-M

[lilfluff]

Day ten, on which I had visited Wikipedia again and ponder the realms of Tense, Aspect, and Mood&Modality. Also (probably) second to last of the posts involving already prepared material, which would make it the second to last where the numbering is even vaguely connected to the date. Next post hopefully cleaned up and posted later today.

Next post will also have more sentences and vocabulary. Yay sentences and vocabulary. Yay for up too late silliness. Er, right, insert the cut and past in text...

Tense, Aspect, Mood/Modality

Tense and Aspect have been brought up on previous days, time to take a look at mood and maybe get a table of TAM particles (TAM is an abbreviation that makes note of the way tense, aspect, and mood/modality are often tangled together). But what is mood? F. R. Palmer's Mood and Modality describes mood & modality like this on its opening pages, "Tense, rather obviously, is concerned with the time of the event, while aspect is concerned with the nature of the event, particularly in terms of its 'internal temporal constituency' (Comrie 1976: 3) Modality is concerned with the status of the proposition that describes the event." (A book I sadly lack, while I do have the fellow volumes on Tense and Aspect.)

...

Hmm?

Mood is the difference between: "I go to school.", "If I were to go to school.", "I would go to school.", "Go to school!" Mood covers whether the event is real or not real (Realis/Irrealis) and/or attitude (commanding, questioning, emphasizing, etc.).

What moods will OL directly be able to mark? (Note, directly mark, as with English and any other language if there isn't a simple grammatical way of marking something it simply means you have to get wordier and make use of phrasing.)

(As on previous days, links to the related Wikipedia pages)

Indicative Mood as the name implies indicates that something is a simple matter of fact. "I am using the computer," is in the indicative mood. There's no commanding, it's not talking about what might happen if that were what I was doing, it just is. If there's no mood marking then OL defaults to this.

Subjunctive Mood is used to express kinds of unreality: wishes, possibilities, or sometimes used as a polite way to make requests.

Imperative Used when commanding and requesting.

Optative Used for expressing hope (apparently a rare mood to mark with grammar).

Let's however make Mood marking an exception to OL's head firstness and have marking of mood come before the verb:
(mood marker) (verb/verb-phrase) (aspect marker) (tense marker)

Shall aspect and tense remain separate? Early on I said OL would tend towards the isolating/analytical end of things. That said it seems quite reasonable for some blending of aspect and tense. On the other hand four tenses + four aspects. If each gets a separate marker that's eight total. If they get blended that's potentially up to sixteen... For the moment I'm going to go with separate markers but I'm still pondering blending them.