Teacher Discussion Forums

Well, I've been scraping together focus questions and readings from the web. Some very kind Foucault website-organizers have shared their materials, and I have bought Sparks Notes, etc. It's time for our first gathering. I want to do it on March 27th in Seoul. Any who are truly interested, please em...

Andrew: I haven't read it, but I peered at it in Kyobo Books yesterday. Does Eco bring Foucault's ideas to life in that book, or does he mostly just borrow his name? Stephen: Unfortunately my French isn't up to it, but I agree that it's always better to read writers in their native language. Thanks ...

I want to start a reading and discussion group on Foucault. I need to get a pretty good handle on his ideas for my M.A. program, but studying Foucault alone is pretty demoralizing for me at times. I hope there are some others in or near Seoul who would be interested in exploring the following works ...

I'd say It's been lovely seeing you rather than I've loved but that's another issue. Yes, frankly "I've loved seeing you" and "I loved seeing you" both clang for me as a Canadian. I think that's merely a style issue, though. I agree with Steven that the first one makes more sense grammatically. I w...

I read it in context and it was still indecipherable to me. Maybe I shouldn't admit that in public. It just kind of lurches out of the blue in the book. He might explain it two chapters later. He has a habit of doing that without letting on. Thanks for your feedback anyway.

I always thought the Present perfect was the tense we used to express the Perfect aspect in the Present. Sure, why not? I guess it all boils down to terminology, really. Most linguists seem to want to separate tense from aspect completely, but certainly not all of them do that. The only real differ...

Shuntang did say one thing that is a common idea, and that is that Perfect is more of a "tense" than an "aspect". Actually, he stated outright that it was a tense, but clearly that's not cut and dried in the field of linguistics. It's a trivial distinction in day-to-day life, but it becomes quite im...

Thanks, Larry. That helps too. I've definitely got it now. Shuntang just got my back up. I wish everybody would be polite in these forums. I was trying to keep an open mind, but he just wouldn't address my original question until I forced the issue. I like your take on it, and I still really like th...

p.s. Sorry about the "blue" thing. It was just a random colour choice. The similarity to a link didn't occur to me.

Thanks for your straightforward response. I think that view on it has validity. I've seen it in Raymond Murphy's textbook. However, I've found another explanation (since my exchange with shuntang) that helped me a lot more. Bernard Comrie says, while speaking about Russian: "...without a more elabor...

shuntang wrote:Would anyone help me here, what is the difference between the two Progressive?

ExA: "I've been exercising and dieting, but I haven't lost weight."
ExB: "I am exercising and dieting, but I haven't lost weight."

NOW urgent!!

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

No matter how he says, conventional grammars cannot explain Present Perfect. Can he? :o 8) I predict that, what he says to Present Perfect can be word for word said again to either Simple Present or Simple Past. Can you restate the opinion how he explains Present Perfect? If Comrie is that good, ho...

I will say one more thing. I've spent the past weekend studying: Comrie, Bernard, Aspect . Cambridge University Press, 1976 (even while we have been posting our messages) and he addresses (in chapter 3) the ideas that you have been putting forward about tense. He disagrees with you. I suggest you fi...

You are fooling me. There is no adverbial, nor "intuitive adverbials", in your examples. Why shall we create jargon so often? What is the point? I have no credentials at all. Why? They are only English tenses. What do you think they are? The complete sentence a baby can first utter also has to use ...

Well...I can see what you're getting at I think. It seems to be about the presence or absence of adverbials and their effects on the verb group. It is a pattern (in my lists above) that had escaped me, so thank you for pointing that out. I'm still not convinced that your theory doesn't beg the quest...