jeff@tesla.UUCP (Jeff Frey) (11/19/83)
There's a lot of redundancy in language. For examplle "I went ;to the bank yesterday" brings in a past-tense of a verb when clearly the past tense is implicit in the time specifier. Presumably such redundancy permits the recognition of speech even in high-noise situations, for example. Anybody have any idea how this could be extended to improve computer throughput (speed) say by redundancy in input data? Or other applications? Jeff
morgan@uicsl.UUCP (12/01/83)
#R:tesla:-24100:uicsl:8600030:000:1698 uicsl!morgan Nov 30 17:32:00 1983 It is possible, as you imply, to get by without tense marking--some languages do. One (probably not the only) side effect of such redundant marking is similar to the benefit you get in languages where verbs, nouns, determiners, adjectives, etc. are marked for agreement in case, number, gender, noun class, etc. etc.: namely, as information that can be used in determining what goes with what. So just as in a language with relatively free word order there is often some morphological agreement from which one can infer which of the available noun phrases are subject, which object, what modifies what, and so on, just so in English, where the time adverb has a lot of ordering possibilities, in complex sentences one can often tell what adverbs modify which clauses by comparing the tense morpheme on the verb with the semantics of the adverbs. No convincing examples come to mind at the moment, but there should be infinitely many. In short, like other agreement markings, it gives you disambiguation clues in complex sentences. I should add, by the way, that you may be wrong in assuming that the tense marker is entirely superfluous when there's an adverb present. It all depends on how you count tenses and tense markers, which depends in turn on what grammatical theory you're using. For example there's a subtle difference between I eat meat now and I am eating meat now likewise between I ate meat last Thursday and I was eating meat last Thursday IF your analysis treats the differences as simple tense differences, then clearly tense carries information beyond what's conveyed by the adverb alone. But this all depends on what theory of tense and aspect you are using.