{"id":118,"date":"2006-12-04T22:41:38","date_gmt":"2006-12-05T03:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ling.bu.edu\/blog\/lx502f06\/2006\/12\/04\/hw8-present-tense\/"},"modified":"2006-12-04T22:41:38","modified_gmt":"2006-12-05T03:41:38","slug":"hw8-present-tense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/2006\/12\/04\/hw8-present-tense\/","title":{"rendered":"HW8: Present tense?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, once again I feel I really should have made the key right away.  Lots of good questions coming in over email.  Here&#8217;s the response to another one.<\/p>\n<p>There is no explicit definition of the interpretation of Present tense on the handout.  This is mainly because Past tense seemed more exciting, so I always used that as an example.<\/p>\n<p>This is what it looked like:<\/p>\n<p>[[ PAST S ]]<sup>M,g,w,t<\/sup> = &exist;t&prime;[t&prime; &lt; t &and; [[S]]<sup>M,g,w,t&prime;<\/sup> ]<\/p>\n<p>(Where &#8220;t&prime; &lt; t&#8221; is suppose to mean that t&prime; is before t.)  That is: &#8220;There&#8217;s a time t&prime; before now, such that S is true at t&prime;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There is a sort of obvious thing you can do to create the present tense version of this, which is just to change &#8220;&lt;&#8221; to &#8220;=&#8221;.  However, if you do this, you wind up saying something kind of overly complicated:<\/p>\n<p>[[ PRES S ]]<sup>M,g,w,t<\/sup> = &exist;t&prime;[t&prime; = t &and; [[S]]<sup>M,g,w,t&prime;<\/sup> ]<\/p>\n<p>That is: &#8220;There&#8217;s a time t&prime;, which is now, such that S is true at t&prime;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s really pretty much just the same thing as saying &#8220;S is true now.&#8221;  So, really, the simplest version of this (and still just as accurate, and still requiring that Tense raises) would be simply to assume that the rule for present tense is:<\/p>\n<p>[[ PRES S ]]<sup>M,g,w,t<\/sup> = [[S]]<sup>M,g,w,t<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>That is, PRES doesn&#8217;t really contribute anything to the meaning.  You can use either of the interpretation rules for [PRES S] I gave above, but the second one is of course the simpler of the two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, once again I feel I really should have made the key right away. Lots of good questions coming in over email. Here&#8217;s the response to another one. There is no explicit definition of the interpretation of Present tense on the handout. This is mainly because Past tense seemed more exciting, so I always used &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/2006\/12\/04\/hw8-present-tense\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading &lsquo;HW8: Present tense?&rsquo; &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homework-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ling-blogs.bu.edu\/lx502f06\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}