From jfsiege@ilstu.edu Mon Sep 30 13:13:13 2002 Received: from mailscan6.cac.washington.edu (mailscan6.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.14]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.09) with SMTP id g8UKCwFD137522 for ; Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:12:58 -0700 Received: FROM mxu1.u.washington.edu BY mailscan6.cac.washington.edu ; Mon Sep 30 13:12:57 2002 -0700 Received: from merlin.ilstu.edu (merlin.ilstu.edu [138.87.4.8]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.09) with ESMTP id g8UKCudX031218 for ; Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:12:57 -0700 Received: from stv203f ([10.20.2.40]) by merlin.ilstu.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id PAA18728 for ; Mon, 30 Sep 2002 15:13:04 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <3eed01c268ae$6d6aa8e0$2802140a@ilstu.edu> From: "Janice Siegel" To: Subject: plufuture tense? Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 14:23:08 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.6600 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600 Ouch. this is the kind of question I know I am going to regret asking. My first instinct is to forbid my students from asking any more questions. Ever. You'll see why in a moment. I provide the lesson in a nutshell below not to teach grammar but to inform you how the question developed. OK. I presented the tense timeline today. Present has the quantity of zero, imperfect and perfect are at -1, pluperfect at -2, future at +2, and future perfect at +1. I explained that you couldn't make a checkerboard jump between tenses, or to mix game metaphors, your tense dominoes had to be touching on one side. So, you could use the pluperfect if you were already in the past, to indicate something that happened one more step even further in the past ("more thoroughly finished = plus + perfectum), but you couldn't use the pluperfect with the present (thereby skipping one value on the timeline). I also explained that the future perfect has to fall in between the present and the future because it refers to a time both in the future of the present and in the past of the future. OK, fine. Same "no checkerboard moves rule" applies - an action in the future perfect will happen before something else does, and that's the two tenses in a row (+1 and +2 on the timeline). So one student then wants to know if you have a sequence of three actions, all of which will happen in the future but happen one after the other, is there such a thing as the future pluperfect, or as he put it, the plufuture? Example: "You will have had done this before you will have done that before I get home." or even "You had better have done this before you will have done that before I get home." Help? Can we even say that in English???? TIA, Janice Janice Siegel Assistant Professor of Classics Illinois State University Department of Foreign Languages Box 4300 Normal, Illinois 61790-4300 office phone: 309-438-3583 cell phone: 309-287-3189 fax: 309-438-8038 jfsiege@ilstu.edu http://lilt.ilstu.edu/drjclassics http://lilt.ilstu.edu/drjclassics2 .