The Routine On Yesterday

[Duncan Powrie]

Shun (hope you don't mind if we continue to call you Shun), your use of "we" is quite presumptuous (unlike my use of it just then), because you seem to think you have made arguments and reached conclusions that everyone would agree with. Unfortunately, your reasoning and logic are unclear, and your English pretty execrable for somebody who seems to imagine himself to be an academic.

Ever had a reply from the likes of Comrie, Shun? How about Palmer? Leech? Not even Lewis? Thought not. Oh, maybe you didn't bother reading their books, Shun, which is a shame - they could maybe teach you something about style at least. Seems the only guy you quote is Tregidgo, and he seems to be more talking about the "state" of teaching than Linguistics or even Applied Linguistics (and I must admit to not knowing who he is at all - probably he sank back into obscurity after hitting an all-time high with his publication in that most respected of academic journals, that of the British Council).

Incidentally, I haven't read half of those guys either, but I think I would, and would at least allude to them if not quote them if I wanted to be taken at all seriously in any discussions of tense, aspect etc. You don't need to get all fancy with your phrasing, but some patient "building up" for any devoted readers there might be would be nice (I myself must admit to scanning through your posts and concentrating more upon the scornful responses they generate).

Anyway, I rather resent being told that I, as an English teacher, do this, or believe that, or am confused about whatever. Actually, I have never taken half of what they push during training seriously, especially not the obsession (I think I can call it that) with the verb phrase, and the rather silly contrasting sentences and contexts they dream up to patronize their trainees with and potentially always risk confusing their students, sowing the seeds of doubt, as if the presentation phase was lacking integrity in itself.

Often there is not a choice regarding form (at least, not a conscious one), therefore any "choices", if examined closely (en masse), will reveal a consistency that should hardly prove confusing (more like illuminating). Systematicity does exist in English (and every other language), and you can find it (if you feel you need to look), a bit like you can feel your matress under your sheets if you don't feel like sleeping (you could even check for monsters under the bed, but none will be there, I assure you).

[Duncan Powrie]

Oh, Shun, as for your telling that joke to Lorikeet, would you be happy if we all ignored you totally?

We are not wanting to get involved in "academic" (not only low in clarity and quality, but also ultimately pointless) debates with you, we are just trying to tell you "nicely" to p*ss off back to your "Forum for English Tense" website (where you can "argue" with people who have nothing better to do with their time), and to be in a position to tell you to p*ss off does necessitate opening the thread to get to the reply button, in the process of which we can hardly help but notice, for example, an irritatingly large font, or a ridiculous change in name.

As I just said in my above post, don't imagine that people view these threads to read what you wrote!

[Xui]

We are not wanting to get involved in "academic" (not only low in clarity and quality, but also ultimately pointless) debates with you, we are just trying to tell you "nicely" to p*ss off back to your "Forum for English Tense" website (where you can "argue" with people who have nothing better to do with their time), and to be in a position to tell you to p*ss off does necessitate opening the thread to get to the reply button, in the process of which we can hardly help but notice, for example, an irritatingly large font, or a ridiculous change in name.

As I just said in my above post, don't imagine that people view these threads to read what you wrote!

Dear Duncan Powrie,

How academic you express yourself!!

Xui

[Duncan Powrie]

Shun, allow me to clarify and emphasize: We are not wanting to get involved in "academic" (not only low in clarity and quality, but also ultimately pointless) debates WITH YOU.

The academics I mentioned seem to be very respected, and appear in many bibliographies, so doubtless they are well worth reading; and many linguists, though not originally native speakers, nevertheless go on to write very clearly and are quite influential (e.g. Otto Jespersen).

It says a lot about your level of English that you always seem to totally misunderstand anything anyone says to you, but I suppose some will excuse your fossilizations and "plateauing out" because they mistakenly believe that you have been spending time in coming to worthwhile (but incomprehensible - so how can anyone presume they are worthwhile at all?!) "conclusions" about the English language.

I myself feel that if you were to improve your English, a lot of the frustrations you have with the language would soon resolve themselves; you would actually be making sense rather than picking senses apart all the time.

Come back to us in at least ten years, when you have not only got a better grasp of English generally, but might also be smattering your idiosyncratic writing with some terminology that shows evidence of some academic learning too.

It is one thing to be able to understand (you think) what English writers have written, but it is quite another thing to be in any position to help others to understand much at all. Think hard on that!

Hmm did that "pissing in the wind" phrase come from Larry, I wonder? It wouldn't have much meaning to me anyway, even if it were being used appropriately.

[Duncan Powrie]

How academic you express yourself!!

Shun, I am obviously not being academic here at all: I am simply telling you (on behalf of many, I suspect) to just F*CK OFF.

Things only get academic around here when people can understand what others are saying and "pounce" on what has been said (or at least, the implications of what is said).

With you, it hardly ever gets to the "pounce" stage, let alone the "implications".

Basically, people are tired of you, Shun, or, more precisely, your crap English and, frankly, mental way of corresponding. Most of the time, you are talking to yourself, and you seem totally unable to become part of a wider English-speaking community (with its "usual" ways of starting and maintaining conversations). I suggest you stick with your own kind, or are the Chinese beginning to despise your presence (note I did not say you yourself, as a person, who ever he is, under all the BS) too?

We have noted where your new website is at, and should we feel the need, we will come pick your brain. Still, why should we bother, it's not like you actually know (i.e. can express) much at all, is it, and you've never once really tried picking ours, have you? (I mean, with genuine queries rather than mere rhetorical preludes - note that I didn't say "overtures" ).

If you know if all already, why oh why do you feel the need to tell us numbskulls? You pity us in our "ignorance"? Well, I don't know if we are ignorant, but we can do without your "pity". I know what sources I would prefer to turn to, and if I disagree with them, it will remain a personal thing, or at most, a polite discussion between colleagues and/or friends.

Do you have any friends, Shun?

[Xui]

If without your dirty language, we have been discussing so well and reaching a similar opinion. I don't know why you and Lorikeet have to stand in the way, focusing on the pen name Xui. We have successfully upturned the old belief that Simple Past is used to tell a finish. If you have any idea, you may please express yourself. Why will you have to throw rubbish into this thread, without any valuable idea? Did you learn all this from readings? What is the matter with you? Shame on you!

[Duncan Powrie]

There you go again with your "we", Shun. You are having a conversation with yourself. Nobody has agreed one way or the other with anything you have said; you haven't "proved" a thing, and probably never will.

Is your new website not generating enough hot air to keep you afloat there? Then I suggest you put more energy into that, rather than continuing to irritate people on Dave's.

[woodcutter]

Since I got kicked off the MA Applied linguistics course, let me use the MA (with merit I'll have you know!) I possess from SOAS in being nice to Chinese people to good use.

Xui, I do find your idea interesting, because although it makes some kind of sense to assume that because regular action is implied by present simple tense the past simple ought to be similar, I have never known a student to jump to that conclusion.

Also, we do seem to always provide a time reference when using past simple.

[revel]

Good morning all!

I'm afraid I'm going to have to second (and third) the attitudes of others here in saying that Xui's English is muddy and confused and thus does not aid in getting his/her possibly "interesting" points through to us.

I'm going to pick up on something woodcutter pointed out, clearly: "....we do seem to always provide a time reference when using past simple." The reason for this, I believe, is not because of grammatical mores, but rather a case of weakened pronunciation of the past tense in English.

The traditional list of irregular verbs found printed in three columns in the back of almost any ESL book is rarely longer than some 50 or 60 verbs, though I have seen one that, including such useful verbs as "arise", reached 115. These verbs, for the most part, are pretty frequently used in English and so can be irregular because they will be recognized in their past form which is sometimes radically different from their present form. So, the verb itself indicates that we are talking about something that happened not in the "now" that we are presently experiencing, but rather in a "then" that exists/existed before the now.

All the rest of the verbs are regular, that is, we stick a written "-ed" on the "base" or "root" form of the verb so that the meaning of a less frequently used verb does not get lost in a strange transformation into the past. Though there are four different pronunciations of this written "-ed" based on the preceding sound, in the grand majority of the cases, a native speaker does not pronounce the "-ed" but rather the "root" or "base" form. Thus, we add a "yesterday" or a "last week" in order to make it clear that we are talking about "then" and not "now".

What's more, the universe of discourse will help to place the verb in an utterance in its time-frame. A sentence rarely stands alone, but is surrounded by other sentences and becomes, at times, a conversation. If the sentence is "I played tennis", which in natural speech sounds pretty much the same as "I play tennis" (reduction requires that the "-ed" of "played" be supressed since it is followed by the "t" of tennis, the unvoiced equivilant of the voiced "d"), even a native would not be able to tell you if this were a habitual activity or a once done activity unless "yesterday" were included, or the preceding question "What did you do yesterday?" or "What do you do on Mondays?" were provided.

I might play tennis again today, or tomorrow, but that would be made clear with other verb constructions, like "I'm playing tennis this afternoon" or "I'm going to play tennis tomorrow", which, for the addition of sounds, are quite different from the original "I play/played tennis" example. Thus, for the native speaker and the ESL speaker who has worked on his/her communication skills, there is little room for confusion over when the playing took/takes/is going to take place.

Trying to dissect the verb seems to be an attempt to make it as complicated as the verb might be in L1. I see this all the time in my Spanish students, who have a more complex verb system, with up to 49 changes in verb (many rarely used and even archaic) and a resistance to accepting that it is not the verb itself that demonstrates time, but the combination of many factors. The verb in English is a very humble, simple thing that by itself doesn't offer much more than a marker of the action in question. Keep it simple, since all those other words and prefixes and suffixes that do the work that "conjugations" do in other languages are indeed sometimes complex. The importance may be in helping students to stop focusing so much on the verb and its few forms and begin focusing on all the rest of the utterance.

Does that make sense to you all?

peace,
revel.

[Xui]

Thank you Woodcutter,

Xui, I do find your idea interesting, because although it makes some kind of sense to assume that because regular action is implied by present simple tense the past simple ought to be similar, I have never known a student to jump to that conclusion.

Also, we do seem to always provide a time reference when using past simple.
=====================

However, the conclusion seems inevitable. If one points to a friend and says "I live in this house", the living logically includes intervals when NOW he goes out of the house working, or even for a rather long time traveling THESE DAYS. But we won't regard that, when doing so, his living in the house is finished. That is to say, living in a house does include the time not living in it. He may come back and continues to live in it today.

Similarly, the routine of eating dinner does include the time we don't eat as we are full. Therefore, if We ate dinner yesterday, and then we stop, it doesn't mean the routine ends on that day. We may still continue to eat today.

As for time reference you have mentioned, we have openly stated that we are checking up the idea with yesterday, two days ago, etc., any time expressions that favor Simple Past. As far as I know, however, we don't always provide a time reference to Simple Past.

Bests,

[JuanTwoThree]

Revel: add to that those irregular verbs that don't change. "I let my son go to the cinema" needs a wider context to be understood.

What Xui and others perhaps try is to establish how much information can be gleaned from an English verb tense. As if there were nuances. As Revel says you need a lot more help from the surroundings than you do in Spanish, say.

Perhaps the answer would be to look at what it doesn't tell us.
"I played golf yesterday" is just that, I'm afraid. Nothing else can be inferred, to paraphrase Harzer et al. Grammar book writers may be unfortunately clumsy in their explanations and it's understandable, but barely, that an eccentric interpretation of "finished action" might be "an action never to be repeated again". The most cursory study of "I spoke English yesterday" shows that this is so manifestly not meant to mean "never again" that it's, at the very least, obtuse to suppose so.

For example there is such a paucity of information in "I went to Paris when I was a boy" that we need "I used to go ....." to be any clearer.

Another story: a proud mother is watching her son at his passing out parade and she says "Look, everybody is out of step except Tommy"

[Xui]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to second (and third) the attitudes of others here in saying that Xui's English is muddy and confused and thus does not aid in getting his/her possibly "interesting" points through to us.

Why have most persons here suddenly turned linguists full of filthy language and liked to touch personal matter? Not only one or two persons, but also many more.

Oh, now I understand. I did quit a forum once because a person threw dirty words at me, though they deleted the insulting message later on.

My goodness, people here must then think that, if giving enough insulting words to me, they will kick me out of here instantly.

My goodness!!! I left that forum also for another reason!!

In the past, the forum of Applied Linguistics didn't need registration, and people sent much much more filthy languages to me anonymously when they found it hard to follow the discussion. I never went away because of such dirty words.

My goodness!!! They misinterpret not only grammar, but also psychology. Ha!!!

I am noted for my slow thinking. But I think hard and understand many things. Some persons don't even think.

Xui

[Duncan Powrie]

Shun, JuanTT seems to be saying what I couldn't be bothered to. English speakers do use one form over another, and there isn't a problem until not just one, but two, then three, then whole groups then generations of grammarians get involved in trying to explain the whys and wherefores of that that speech.

Obviously, these explanations may or may not be clear, or represent the facts perfectly, and there are many learners if not teachers for whom these extra layerings of metalanguage lack explanatory power and may even distract from "real" (i.e. quantitative) learning.

You are clearly not a "quantitative" type of student; in fact, you seem to fancy yourself as something of a leading grammarian. To which almost everybody would reply, "Huh?". Most grammarians that we know have excellent English, and they take the time to clearly present their case, and address (even if they ultimately refute) other theories.

You have quite bad English, it must be said, and you never once allude to other writers on the subject. Many people will, therefore, be suspicious of what you have to say, IF THEY CAN UNDERSTAND IT.

But I think the greatest problem is not so much that you have issues with grammatical explanations, but that you seem to have issues with the language itself. You take exception to ALL previous explanations, without seeming to relaize that their similarities must be based in some part upon what different grammarians all perceived to be similarities in the system (and modern grammarians are increasingly concerned with how the system is actually used, too).

So, I think you will just have to accept that people do indeed (albeit subconsciously) make often fine distinctions of meaning through using one form rather than another (which we can attempt to explain, but do not ultimately have to in many cases). If you can accept that, you should be able to just let the language "wash over you", no?

But you can't accept it. You seem to want not just every competing explanation to be dismissed, you also seem to want the language to change to follow your "logical" thinking.

Well, the competing theories will be around long after you have ceased to be (or write), Shun, as will the language, as will the many learners who are getting on with learning and progressing, and in the process probably coming to sounder realizations than you ever have or will.

Remember, Shun, that grammar is ultimately only theory: the real language is the text itself, and that text always exhibits features that you would seem to deny the existence, veracity or "obviousness" of.

[Duncan Powrie]

By the way, Shun, revel hasn't used "filthy" language, I have. The main reason I used that dirty language is because I am refusing to see this as an academic debate; my language therefore is an appropriate function of this context.

Basically, I do not think you are linguistically, academically, socially, spiritually or mentally up to the task of convincing anyone, Shun, and I am trying to save everybody (including you!) the time and frustration of being nice and pretending things are getting any nearer a compromize.

Nasty as that all may sound, it is not said on the basis of this single thread you have posted under your new alias; it is based on experiences and "insights" I and others have gained from the many, very long and tedious threads that you made before as Shuntang.

Once bitten, twice shy. You never compromize or seem open to genuine debate, Shun, so why should we (be)?

[Xui]

A very decent woman reported to the police that the man who lived across the street walked naked in the house, and this annoyed her very much. The police asked how she knew the man was naked? The woman testified, "I stand on the chair so I can watch everything about him. He is even naked in winter!!"

As for myself, I will not intentionally study something I know indecent, at least not standing on a chair.

Xui