Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tense-aspect-mood

This discussion was subject to a deletion review on 2011 April 30.
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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) Logan _Talk ^{Contributions} 01:01, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Tense-aspect-mood[edit]

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Body of article is a list of languages, with some commentary on each. It is impractical to have a discussion of every language in the world on this page. It is not certain whether "tense-aspect-mood" is an established concept in the study of grammar. Count Truthstein (talk) 15:15, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose deletion. The article is well-sourced, with 28 references. The separate articles on tense, aspect, and mood are not by themselves sufficient in that they don't cover the interactions among the three concepts (except slightly in passing).

As for the impracticality of discussing every language in the world, the same could be said for a lot of other linguistics articles. The value in discussing how some languages handle tense-aspect-mood (or some other feature of language) is obvious to me: Doing so illustrates the variety of possibilities. Beyond a certain point, which I think has not been reached in this article, there would be diminishing returns in adding more examples, so there is no need to try to cover every language.

As for whether tense-aspect-mood is an established concept, here are some quotes from titles of articles in the reference list:

"Tense, Aspect, and Modality"

"Tense, Mood and Aspect"

"Tense, Aspect and Mood"

"Tense/Mood/Aspect"

"the Tense-Mood-Aspect System"

"Tense-Mood-Aspect Systems"

Clearly from this, tense, aspect, and mood are often analyzed as a unit, and that unit is an established concept Duoduoduo (talk) 19:19, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep It should of course not be a list of languages, though it will need examples. The term is common in the lit, as is the abbreviation TAM, because in many if not most languages, tense, aspect, and mood are conflated, so that the individual terms are often inadequate. — kwami (talk) 20:00, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 15:21, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, the choice of title seems a bit weird (I would have chosen Tense, aspect and mood) but this definitely is an established linguistic concept. - filelakeshoe ^{(SAVE WIKIPEDIA)} 15:51, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: An article which covered interaction among these could be useful. One problem I have with the article is that the section on English overlaps a lot with English modal verb and English verbs (and English grammar as well) and thus there are more places between these articles where problematic material can creep in. I feel it should focus on grammatical structures which express several of tense, aspect and mood rather than trying to give an overview of the grammar.

Another difficulty I have is with terminology. I saw "tense, aspect and mood" as indexes to give the appropriate form of a verb lexeme. This is based on Latin grammar (Latin_conjugation), which is where these words come from and what they were originally used for. (Aspect was a category of tenses, with three tenses in each of two aspects. There were also voice, person and number.) Conflation of structure and meaning is a problem which seems to be common in the study of grammar. What we need is precise semantic vocabulary (perhaps "time" instead "tense") but this might not be possible. Perhaps a note should be put in the article to say that "tense", "aspect" and "mood" are being used semantically. I am also worried about the use of phrases like "modality of permission", and am not sure if there really is such a thing. The concept of modality may be being used as a bag for a jumble of semantic concepts. Count Truthstein (talk) 23:59, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've added some examples to the lede. As far as I noticed, the sections of the article on specific languages focus on the interaction of tense, aspect, and mood (or the absence of interaction if that is a distinguishing feature of the language -- that too is one way that some languages handle TAM).

The article tense (grammar) correctly states: "Tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, that indicates when the situation takes place." This is standard in linguistics, even though teaching grammars of some languages use the term in a looser sense. Likewise, aspect and mood are being used in the standard linguistic way -- see those articles. I don't see the point in putting in something to say that these terms are being used in the linguistically correct way, especially since the lede explicitly defines them. And no, the term "modality" is not being used as a bag for a jumble of concepts; it's being used as linguists use it -- see the article linguistic modality, which defines it as "According to [a set of rules, wishes, beliefs,...] it is [necessary, possible] that [the main proposition] is the case." So the modality of permission refers to clauses such as "You may go [in accordance with the speaker's rules or wishes]". Take a look at the references [1] and [7], whose titles contain the word "modality." Note that mood and modality refer to the same kinds of information being conveyed: for mood, the information is conveyed morphologically, while modality refers to the information being conveyed morphologically or otherwise. Duoduoduo (talk) 01:24, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the examples are good. To demonstrate the meaning of "tense" as used in the article, consider this sentence from the lede: "Often any two of tense, aspect, and mood (or all three) may be conveyed by a single grammatical construction". It is meaning which is being conveyed by the grammatical construction, so tense, aspect and mood are being treated as categories of meaning. However, depending on the language, the grammatical construction in question may be labelled as a particular "tense", "aspect" or "mood". For example, in English the present tense (grammatical meaning) construction "He does not run every day" denotes a habitual aspect (semantic meaning). The present tense (grammatical meaning) construction "We are going tomorrow" denotes future tense (semantic meaning). Count Truthstein (talk) 01:42, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The thing is that terminology used within a language to describe itself, like you describe with the forms in Latin grammar, is pretty arbitrary and meaningless. This article shouldn't talk about what we think a tense is in English, for example the fallacy that the concept of a "future tense" exists, when the formation used most commonly to talk about the future is the one we call the "present continuous". No, this should be written solely from a language-neutral linguistic perspective, not making correlations to English or Latin or any "standard" as we would have done in the 16th century. - filelake shoe 17:28, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I am all in favour of articles that address issues in a connected way, rather than pretending that (say) tense, aspect, and mood can be managed each in isolation. Years ago I contributed to Grammatical aspect (if I have the name right; cf. links above); and I may do so again. I wish editors well with the present article. I might drop in and see how things are progressing, if I can find the time. Noetica^Tea? 23:37, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep. TAM certainly is "an established concept in the study of grammar", as the first ten cited references clearly attest. The state of the article just prior to nomination showed that the topic is notable and verifiable, sources are available, and no original research is necessary to create a solid encyclopedic article. While it is true that the article cannot and should not try to describe the TAM system of every world language, I don't think there is an attempt to do that. Instead, there are examples of analyses of TAM. If the examples seem inapt, they might be cleaned up, reduced, or changed, but there is no cause for deletion. Cnilep (talk) 02:01, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, interconnectedness of these three category domains is a legitimate topic even if each of the three has its own article. Discussion of this interconnectedness is a very well-established topic in research. Content as it stands is decent enough. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:10, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.