Teacher Discussion Forums

Unless you have. Which in one egregious case I doubt.

All the recent silliness on this board has goaded me into trying to explain how far I have got. I am no linguist but I have been thinking about these things for more than ten years.

A long preamble: Grammar book writers don't dictate how things are, they observe. We don't use English according to their rules. They try and find rules to describe how we use English. And they use words which their readers can understand. We fly, they are bird-watchers. You can't attack the language because it has no voice and criticising the bird-watchers for what the birds do is silly. And the watchers' notes are just notes.

The explanations that they give at each level are not lies; they are sufficient truths. If they tell an elementary student that "make" is "construct, build, end up with" and "do" is "everything else" , they are not lying but rather telling a truth, using metalanguage understandable at that time, which will do until it needs to be substituted by another sufficient truth. If and when it ever needs to be.

In other words, what your physics teacher told you when you were thirteen was true: "Light travels in straight lines" . Well, it does in Newton's ' world, which is where most of us live. It may bend in Space but we are not there. If you find out later that light does bend do you think "That liar!" ?

So tenses: none of it is original, I'm afraid.


First of all there is closeness. All uses of the word "go" show it . Present Simple, Imperative, Infinitive, Bare Infinitive. These may be just names for specific applications of "go" but they are all firmly in the part of our brain that recognises that this is, if you like, Newton's world, at sea level, where things are near.

A Spanish mother, on TV looking at photos of her cameraman son who had been shot by snipers months before, said "he's a lovely boy" and I wasn't going to tell her her grammar was wrong.

Don't confuse nearness and "present": "If I die" is not present (apart from the name given to "I die") but we feel the closeness when we speak in that way, which is why we say "die".


Now for more intellectual theft from the towering genius of Michael Lewis and "The English Verb". Well, we seem to use "went" when we can't bring ourselves to use "go" . Why? Because we are no longer close. One reason He mentions is "the remoteness of time" : we use "went" when we really feel that distance of time, and not because "you use the past with words like yesterday", though it's true.

My man Lewis goes on to "the remoteness of hypothesis" to explain "If I died, I would ......". ( If you have a velvet-covered box and you sit on it, it's a chair. If you put candles on it, it's a table. To say "if + past simple " is to call the box a chair even when your dinner is on it, though it is a necessary step to enlightenment)

So what's the connection between "dinosaurs existed" and "if dinosaur existed"? Well they have in common that neither are "dinosaurs exist" . Heavy stuff!

Then the demigod describes the "remoteness of relationship" . When we use the "past simple" to say "Did you want a cup of tea?" and "could" rather than "can" in those circumstances when we wish to distance ourselves.

Nevertheless it is not a lie or a conspiracy or even a half-truth to say "Use the past simple to be extremely polite. Example: " Did Madam want anything else?" " It is quite true at that moment of the learner' progress.

Sorry about the plagiarism but there are things that need spelling out, and people who need these things spelled out to.

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time"

For further information buy the book.

Please, before we have to suffer any more "expertise" (including mine)

This is good too
http://gulp.no/hhgttg/hg-2-15.html

All nice and fine. I agree with most of what you say/are saying/said.

The explanations that they give at each level are not lies; they are sufficient truths. If they tell an elementary student that "make" is "construct, build, end up with" and "do" is "everything else" , they are not lying but rather telling a truth, using metalanguage understandable at that time, which will do until it needs to be substituted by another sufficient truth. If and when it ever needs to be.

But, do you think that most students realise they are being told sufficient truths? And if they do realise it, are they correct in objecting to being told sufficient truths?

I've read that the Japanese don't (can't ever?) say the equivalent of "Go jump in a lake", they kind of more would always say something like "(Please) come back after jumping in a lake" (Jay Rubin, Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You. Tokyo: Kodansha International).

I guess the Japanese really are more polite and sociable creatures than us westerners; in English, we would need to append an invitation for the "jumper" to return to make it absolutely clear that they were welcome to.

What's the implication in the thread title, JTT? You being "Japanese" about it?

BTW the above "analysis" is meant to be a joke: "Go jump in a lake" is obviously an insult in English, and the Japanese have insults of their own (which don't involve jumping in lakes, much less polite requests to wetly return). Yup, Rubin's book is quite a hoot! The perfect antidote to reams of unalloyed grammar.

This is not the first post on this site to make me feel guilty becasue I have not read "The Book". Is it a cult of some kind? I will read it when I am next in civilized parts, I promise.

Nonetheless I am already very familiar with what Juan has written here.

I'll leave aside the stuff about broad generalizations being "true at the time", since I am also in favour of them.

My recent feeling about the concept of "distance" or "remoteness" is that this is a meaningless label covering three meaningful things, past, politeness and unreality. What other definition is there? Why can I say "I play tennis"? I am not playing tennis now. It is remote.

If a student has the idea that these three things always require the past form, he/she will come out with things like.....

Please sir, gave me another chance with my essay!

....and will be unable to use the first conditional. It is perhaps more helpful, therefore, to look at the reasons why the past form is employed in certain situations which are not strictly past.

woodcutter wrote: ... It is perhaps more helpful, therefore, to look at the reasons why the past form is employed in certain situations which are not strictly past.

Would you like to begin?

It'd be perfectly logical to suggest that English had a past subjunctive. There'd be an another imaginary column in the irregular verbs list and the only difference between it and the column of past simples next to it would be where one would say "was/were" the other would only put "were".

Mind you, if this is true then "if+past simple, would" is a downright lie rather than a sufficient truth.

Why can I say "I play tennis"? I am not playing tennis now. It is remote

If the speaker says I play tennis then it is clearly not remote in his/her mind at the moment of speaking - he or she is referring to a habit which is relevant to now e.g.
I play tennis every Saturday/regularly/that's what keeps me fit. Of course, this doesn't preclude Andre Agassi from saying I played tennis last Saturday

"Remoteness" does not mean "not in progression at the moments of speaking", it's rather more wide-ranging than that.

I've never known a student say *Please sir, gave me another chance with my essay as the base form is used for direct instructions.

Then again, I've always been a big fan of Lewis. The English Verb was required reading for my RSA Diploma course (now called DELTA), so my course organisers clearly thought he was onto something. Even if you don't share his views, he challenges you to reexamine your own.

I tend to agree with woodcutter.

I find the concepts of closeness and remoteness useful for native speakers who fully understand the usage of the respective tenses. As explanatory devices for someone learing the language, they suck.

Stephen Jones wrote:I tend to agree with woodcutter.

I find the concepts of closeness and remoteness useful for native speakers who fully understand the usage of the respective tenses. As explanatory devices for someone learing the language, they suck.

I've been using those terms with ESL students at all levels for around 7 years now. Most have found them very useful and an easier way to remember the purpose behind the different uses of the past tense.

If you want to say something sucks, why don't you add "in my experience"? There are many ways to describe grammar items, this is only one of them.

Maybe you didn't fully grasp the meaning of proximity and remoteness. Maybe you just can't communicate it well enough to your students.

Please sir, give me another chance!
Please sir, can you give me another chance?
Please sir, could you give me another chance?

Which is more immediate, more "tug-on-your-heartstrings", probably going to be more effective, in leaving less room for thoughtful denial? Obviously, the remoteness=politness thing will not always be functionally useful/effective for every purpose.

Sir relents, and later the student beams (or perhaps snickers) "Sir gave me another chance!".

Duncan Powrie wrote:Please sir, give me another chance!
Please sir, can you give me another chance?
Please sir, could you give me another chance?

Which is more immediate, more "tug-on-your-heartstrings", probably going to be more effective, in leaving less room for thoughtful denial? Obviously, the remoteness=politness thing will not always be functionally useful/effective for every purpose.

Sir relents, and later the student beams (or perhaps snickers) "Sir gave me another chance!".

Did you believe that the remoteness-proximity "model" is based on two extremes on a line? It isn't.

There is a cline from one to the other and the choice of tense can be anywhere on that cline toward one end or another depending on the tense used/required. Your non-modal, more direct, address above (give) would be placed at or somewhere near the proximity end of the cline and the "can" (modal) placed to the somewhere between the non-modal example and the "could" example, which itself would be placed at or near to the remoteness end of the cline.

I don't know what to believe anymore...the world was full of false yet comfortable certainties until Shun completely blew me away with his reasoning!

The one thing I didn't believe was that this student would say "Please sir, gave me another chance"!

Anyway, can't you see the "cline" drooping through my three artfully-arranged examples?! Is there much of a difference between a cline and a line? Shame on you, you are a bad bad man mr metal56, a filthy typist, and I won't respond to your nonsense ever again!!!

What then is the definition of "remote"? It clearly has nothing to do with physical distance, as it normally does. In regards to time it ought to mean past or future, but it only seems to mean "past" to Mr.Lewis. I suppose we can follow that it may mean "remote from reality". However, a remote tone is the opposite of a polite tone, so it must mean remote from "directness". Yet the most important thing about changing "Open the window!" into something indirect is the addition of the modal, not the employment of a past form.

Yes. Using just "Can...", said sweetly with eyelids a-fluttering, would seem sufficient to get the window closed.

Maybe "remote" is being confused with "aloof". If I understand the idea correctly, to be polite there is, supposedly, a tendency to pile in more and more words getting more "remote" in its linguistical meaning but more "polite" at the same time.

"Window!" is one extreme whereas "I wondered if you would possibly mind doing me the favour of being so kind as to open the window" is the other, where the -ed of wondered but also the framing of the question as a hypothesis and the general circumlocution all contribute to "remoteness=politeness". Even one change, such as "I wonder " instead of "I wondered" takes you one station back down the line/cline.

Negatives are the same: "I don't suppose you could open the window?" which is bl**ding silly when you think about it.

Hmmm. Future as remoteness? "Help" "Help me" "Will you help me" "Won't you help me?" all the way to "I was wondering etcccccc"
stopping at all stations.