On Tue, February 26, 2013 14:49, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote:
> Doug Foxvog wrote:
>> On Sun, February 24, 2013 10:08, Phil Murray wrote:
>> > ...
>> > John S. begins with an excerpt from Chen's paper, including: "English
>> > requires speakers to encode a distinction between present and future
>> > events ...[snip]" (01)
>> > No, it doesn't, strictly speaking. You can say, "It rains tomorrow."
>> > and be understood perfectly by almost every English speaker, even if
>> > the sentence occurs in isolation. But you will probably be thought of
>> > as someone who has limited familiarity with "standard" English. (02)
>> This is understandable, but understood to be "wrong". (03)
> John meant "English grammar requires..." Phil meant "violating the
> grammatical requirement does not necessarily interfere with
> communication". (04)
Sure. IMHO, it slows down the understanding of the sentence as
processing abnormal grammar takes longer. (05)
> Moreover, an expression like "if it rains tomorrow" seems
> to be acceptable in modern speech, (06)
Ed, here you changed the tense. The example was present tense
being used for future tense ("It rains tomorrow."). You have replaced
that with the conditional tense -- which nowadays is accepted for
conditional future. (07)
One wouldn't use the conditional tense for the conditional present:
* If it rains, my car is currently wet.
If you really want to express conditional present,
you would use conditional progressive ("if it is raining") either
without a temporal modifier or with one indicating the present. (08)
> even though "if it should rain tomorrow" is grammatically proper. (09)
But not common. (010)
> So this thesis is a bit overstated, I think. (011)
Do you consider any of these full sentences better or worse than another:
- It rains tomorrow.
- It rain tomorrow.
- It rain today.
- It rain yesterday.
- It rains yesterday.
? (012)
-- doug f (013)
<snip>
> -Ed
>
>>
>> -- doug foxvog (014)
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