How much nesting can we do in English verb tenses, and what controls that? For an example of what I mean, I can say:
- I eat
- I will eat
- I will have been eating
- I will have been going to eat
But I don't think we can say "I will have been going to have eaten".
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Daniel Filan • •One possibility: basically it goes as far as it makes sense to add extra timing information. But this only works if you disagree about your last positive example, which I personally don't actually think I've ever heard used.
Like, imagine a timeline. "I eat" describes a period of time encompassing now. "I will eat" describes a period of time in the future. "I will have eaten" describes two times; one in the future and one in the past of that future. "I will have been going to eat" describes a time in the future, a time in the past of that future, and a time in the future of that past of the first future. But in some sense this collapses back to the semantic content of "I will eat", and so my guess is that it's basically never used.
Ben Weinstein-Raun
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Daniel Filan
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Daniel Filan • •I think what I mean is that additional times around the loop aren't really adding any extra information, because they introduce new reference points along the timeline that typically don't connect to anything else.
Like, there's some implicit time T that I'm trying to locate with a given statement, and there's an additional time Now that I get from just being in the present.
It makes sense to be like "Some time between Now and [implicitly / contextually defined] T, X will happen", and this is ~ the two-level wrapping. But if you say "Some time between Now and [newly introduced / 'bound' / 'scoped-to-this-statement'] T1, it will be the case that X happened after [implicit / 'free' / contextual] T2", T1 is kind of irrelevant, since it's introduced and used only within the statement.
In principle I guess you could have extra context that disambiguates, but I think it's also kinda relevant that verbs tend to have a subject, a direct object, and up to one indirect object, and typically not more than that.
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
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Daniel Filan
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Ben Millwood
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