madprocess

While trying to proof an English paper into e-prime, I noticed an anomoly: I cannot form the past progressive tense!

Example from my paper:

The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware that Oberon and Titania have been fighting and that Oberon has told Puck to bewitch his wife.

In this example, the two words "have been" cause a problem. Obviously since e-prime does not use any form of "to be," how can I remedy this problem? Has anyone ever found one? I know the wikipedia article says that one does not exist, but I wonder if anyone has any workarounds.

Wildway

madprocess:

how 'bout, "have spent time fighting", "have continued fighting", "have fought without break", "have fought continuously", "have occupied themselves with fighting", "have commenced fighting", "have started fighting"...whaddya think?

-w

Weetabix

I've always found this construction troubling, and I've never found a substitute that didn't sound forced or contrived.

Has anyone else found a good alternative?

ZeroCapacity

The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware that Oberon and Titania have "were" fighting and that Oberon has told Puck to bewitch his wife.

crystalserenity101

'Have been' refers to the state of a subject or object that started in the past and continued to the present. To change 'have been' into e-prime, you can take it back to its origin.

The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware that Oberon and Titania had started and have continued fighting and that Oberon has told Puck to bewitch his wife.

Weetabix

Somehow, I still don't feel comfortable with it. The past progressive expresses an ongoing action in the past. "Have continued" doesn't express that the action had stopped by the time the people of Athens arrived. It seems to imply that the fight continued after the people's arrival.

Not picking at your suggestion, just saying it still doesn't seem to express the same thing to me.

Maybe "had fought" could express the same past action though without exactly the same sense?

crystalserenity101

I see. You are right.

'have fought' is good. Another way to solve it is to change the whole sentence structure. I don't have time right now or I would have made a new sentence of it.

TheMisfortuneTeller

I realize that this thread went cold quite some time ago, but I appreciate the raising of this topic and would like to offer an opinion on this matter. I suggest the following two alternative sentences in E-Prime, depending upon whether one wants to accept the sentence's implications or analyze them:

(1) "The people from Athens [enter] the woods unaware of the [quarrel] between Oberon and Titania and that Oberon has told Puck to bewitch his wife."

(2) "The people from Athens [entered] the woods unaware of the [quarrel] between Oberon and Titania and that Oberon had told Puck to bewitch his wife."

Substituting "enter" for "have come into" (for reasons of conciseness) Sentence (1) invites the reader into a more contemporaneous relationship with the theatrical scene from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, while Sentence (2) pushes the action slightly further away into the concluded past as perceived from the reader's own "present." Which sentence one prefers depends on how much, if any, disbelief the reader wishes to suspend in order to vicariously participate in (i.e., "identify with") the action described by the author. As C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards say somewhere in The Meaning of Meaning, "We can generally take up one of two attitudes in regard to any symbol: we can submit to it as stimulus or interpret it." Sentence (1) suits the suspended disbelief of the theater audience while Sentence (2) favors the semi-detached critic.

Strictly from an E-Prime perspective, the so-called "present" (or habitual, timeless) tense of the Copula as well as the progressive (imperfect) tenses of true verbs invite identification because they blur time distinctions and submerge consciousness "in" time as opposed to helping us maintain a conscious distance "from" time. For this reason, I consider the so-called "auxiliary" Copula as much a General Semantics problem as the more easily recognizable Copula of Identity and Copula of Predication. Hence Korzybski's insistance on appending "dates" to our various disputes, quarrels, spats, and fights.

At any rate, in my E-Prime alternative sentences above, I simply transformed the progressive tense verb "fighting" into to the related noun "fight," which alleviated the necessity for such be-form inflections as "helping," "linking," or "auxiliary" Copulas of Identification and Predication.

Thanks again for raising this interesting aspect of E-Prime practice.

__________________
"If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." -- Tweedledee

Ann.English@clear.net.nz

"I am VERB-ing", "They have been VERB-ing" and all other progressive tenses use the -ing form as an adjective, it seems to me.

If this simple view is valuable, we can restate our problem as "How do we deal with 'I am ADJECTIVE', 'They have been ADJECTIVE', and so on?"

By using verbs, I suggest. "'I behave/appear/react in an adjectival way', 'They have behaved/appeared/reacted in an adjectival way'."

The original sentences

"The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware that Oberon and Titania have been fighting and that Oberon has told Puck to bewitch his wife"

might become

"The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware of Oberon and Titania's fight [or, "long-running conflict"] and of Oberon's advice to Puck to bewitch his wife."

---------- Post added at 11:31 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:30 PM ----------

Tchah! "If this simple view HAS VALUE ..."

TheMisfortuneTeller

Thank you for taking up this thread again on the topic of progressive tenses (or their lack) in E-Prime. I note with interest your suggested alternative sentence:

"The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware of Oberon and Titania's fight [or, "long-running conflict"] and of Oberon's advice to Puck to bewitch his wife."

as compared with the original:

"The people from Athens have come into the woods unaware that Oberon and Titania have been fighting and that Oberon has told Puck to bewitch his wife."

First off, before addressing your views relating to grammar, I would like to note the semantic implications of lexical choices such as "telling" versus "advising." From Act II, Scene II of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, we have ...

Oberon [to Puck]:

"Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league."

Puck [to Oberon]:

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes."

The dialog clearly shows, and the relative status of the characters implies, that the King of Fairies, Oberon, "tells" or "orders" his fairie subject Puck to do his bidding. As in Shakespeare's Elizabethan England and in most remaining monarchies today, sovereigns do not "advise" their subjects, but command them. Therefore, I suggest that -- grammatical issues aside -- your alternative sentence might end with

"... Oberon's telling Puck to bewitch his wife" (meaning the Fairie Queen, Titania.)

The original sentence's word choice, namely the verb "to tell," has merit given the subject matter under consideration and therefore we ought to retain it in preference to other lexical or grammatical considerations that would, in effect, warp the meaning of the sentence.

Second, you suggest using verbs, for example:

"I behave/appear/react in an adjectival way", "They have behaved/appeared/reacted in an adjectival way," etc.

I concur about the primary emphasis on verbs, especially since Charles Sanders Peirce claimed that the verb, and not the common noun, constitutes the logically indispensible basis of any proposition. Yet, if so, we grammatically limit the range of meaning of verbs with adverbs, not adjectives. In light of this observaton, you might want to speak of people who behave/appear/react in an adverbial way, for example: "well," or "badly." People do not behave/appear/react in an adjectival way, for example: "good" or "bad."

Third, the idea of classifying progressive-tense verbs as "adjectives," runs afoul of certain transformational rules affecting adjectives. By this, I mean that we can take a true predicate adjective following the Copula and transpose it into position immediately before the noun whose range of meaning it limits. For example:

A sentence like "The air [Copula-inflection] hot"

begs the question, "So? what about the 'air' and 'hot?'"

But we can transpose the predicate adjective -- thereby eliminating the Copula-inflection -- and get:

"The hot air ..."

Which then affords us the opportunity to say something meaningful and/or relevant, like: "The hot air blowing in from the East created perfect conditions for the brush fires that swept Southern California last week."

As against this transformational rule for adjectives, if we try to apply it to progressive-tense verbs (considering them as adjectives) we might take a sentence like:

"The Athenians [Copula-inflection] coming into the woods"

and transform it into:

"The coming Athenians into the woods." This doesn't work very well.

In summary, then, I would like to say again that I agree about the critical importance of verbs as opposed to common nouns as the basis for clear, communicative sentences in English. But the progressive tense aspect of verbs does not make them any less verbs, much less adjectives; and so I suggest further analysis of how the progressive tense -- as the semantic conveyor of imperfect, or uncompleted action -- functions in the sentence. Then we can inquire as to how E-Prime practice communicates this same meaning of uncompleted action, only using other grammatical, lexical, and semantic resources of the language: resources other than the various Copula-inflections that tend to obscure important relationships in favor of simply naming and classifying, as such predications merely do.

Thank you again for your interesting views and comments. I hope that I learned something from considering and commenting upon them.

__________________
"If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." -- Tweedledee

Ann.English@clear.net.nz

I agree that

"...The original sentence's word choice ... has merit ... and therefore we ought to retain it in preference to other lexical ... [] ... considerations that would, in effect, warp the meaning of the sentence."

I disagree with two words "and grammatical" which appeared next to "lexical" above.

It seems to me that the effort I make to "warp the meaning" of some of my grammar has the effect of un-warping, clarifying, freeing my sentences from dogmatism. Why else should we attempt to write without copula-be?

-----------------


I agree that

" ... the verb, and not the common noun, constitutes the logically indispensible basis of any proposition."

I disagree that

'People do not behave/appear/react in an adjectival way, for example: "good" or "bad."'

It seems to me that people DO behave in an adjectival way, that is, in a bad way, and also that people behave adverbially, that is, "in a bad way". Those four quoted words behave as an adverb, I think.

-------------------

I agree that

' "The coming Athenians into the woods." ... doesn't work very well. '

It seems to me that we require "The coming-in-to-the-woods Athenians [main verb required]" or "The coming Athenians move into the woods [and another VERB optional]" or "The moving Athenians come ..."

In summary, then, I would like to say again that I find it helpful to treat the progressive verb as a copula plus adjective, to move the adjective (the -ING form) and its modifiers to the front of the noun, and to put some effort into choosing a main verb.

Examples.
The car is red.
The car was to have been moving.
The driver had expected to be paying a Chunnel toll..

Rewritten examples.
The red car glowed in the sunlight.
The car stalled, ruining the getaway.
The free ticket delighted the driver.