The Glade 4.0

I need some help settling a dispute with my English Composition teacher. Actually, it's not even a dispute at this point. We both had to admit to uncertainty and/or ignorance on this one. I suppose I should say I need help resolving a question of grammar.

Consider two sentences:

1. Speaking only under the condition of anonymity, a State Department official this week revealed that North Korea totally sucks.
2. After relating an anecdote about his own experiences, Bob dove straight into the heart of the matter.

The central question is whether either of these sentences exhibits a mix of present and past tense. I argue that they do not. At issue is the use of present participles. Of course, present participles show up in progressive/continuous English verb conjugations, including those which are clearly past tense. For instance:

Bob is speaking. (present progressive)
Bob was speaking. (past progressive)
Bob would have been speaking. (past perfect progressive)
Bob will have been speaking. (future perfect progressive)

That isn't the case in either of the given sentences, however.

In sentence 1, my claim is that "speaking" is simply a participle acting as an adjective. It introduces the participle phrase "speaking only under the condition of anonymity", which modifies the subject of the sentence, "official". It further describes the subject at the moment the verb "revealed" occurred.

In sentence 2, "relating an anecdote [...]," is a gerund phrase. In this case, the gerund (participle acting as a noun) "relating" takes a direct object, "anecdote", which is then itself modified by a prepositional phrase ("about his personal experiences"). This exhibits the verb-like behavior of participles more than in sentence 1. Nevertheless, "relating an anecdote [...]," is definitely a gerund, acting as the noun object of the preposition "after". The entire phrase "After relating [...]," is a prepositional phrase which modifies the verb "dove" (answering "when?").

This sentence diagrammer has difficulty diagramming sentence 1 (lol @ "Korea | sucks | that"), and patently refuses to diagram anything as complicated as sentence 2. However, feeding it a couple simpler, but structurally identical sentences seems to confirm my analysis. Try:

1. Sighing inwardly, Bob agreed.
2. After eating breakfast, Bob jogged.

Ok, so that's all fine and good, but we're still just talking about structure. It doesn't really answer the question of tense. Does a participle-as-participle really have tense? What about a gerund? I would say not, which renders the entire question rather meaningless. Then again, as near as my googling can determine, gerunds do have tense in German, and I would strongly suspect that this is where we got them from. I get conflicting answers on whether they have tense in English. Even so, I would guess that they owe their morphology to the progressive verb conjugations. Being coupled to clearly past-tense constructions as they are, any implication of tense would be (in this case) past progressive.

That said, they do seemingly have voice, and it's clearly passive in these examples. So I may be "guilty" of using passive voice -- IMHO there is such a thing as appropriate use of passive voice, and this is one of them -- but I don't think I'm guilty of mixing tenses.

Thoughts? I'd especially like to hear from Khross on this one.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

...

Tell your composition teacher she's an idiot. If you can figure out how to tense an adverb, let me know.

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Hrm. I have a moderately sized post typed up, but the more I typed the more confused I made myself by including only partially related things. Latin, too, which doesn't have any direct bearing on what is accurate in English (no more than German necessarily does, even if we got a certain construct from there).

Doesn't it simply come down to the primary verb (revealed, dove)? Any tenses that do or do not exist in any secondary parts of the sentence shouldn't matter when it comes to the issue of mixing tenses, no? I keep trying to come up with examples and I keep winding up back on indirect speech.

He didn't say that it was. I've omitted some details because it was already TL;DR as-is.

The situation is that I was writing a brief critique of a newspaper column for one of our assignments. We were instructed to pick a tense and stick with it when discussing the author's actions. I.e. either "Smith was correct to observe that blah, blah blah" or "Smith is correct ..." but not both. When I turned in my initial draft, it came back with only one comment, reminding me to watch my tenses. Sure enough, in the process of revising it, I had slipped a couple instances of present tense into what had been a past tense paper.

I revised those back to past tense, but when I handed it in for grading, I commented that I wasn't quite sure what to make of the present participles in question and whether they might be considered present tense. He hadn't actually indicated specifically where he thought I was using present tense (intentionally leaving it as an exercise for the reader, I would assume), so I couldn't tell if he had them in mind as well. We really only had about a minute to discuss it between classes, and he didn't have the paper in front of him at the time. The only conclusion he made was that in sentence #1, which I gave verbally as an example, he wasn't certain which (if any) tense would be attached to the present participle.

...

TL;DR: nouning verbs weirds languages.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Again ...

How the **** do you tense an adverb?

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Perhaps a little more explaination would be more appropriate and maybe even a suggestion on how to approach the topic in a slightly less emphatic manner would provide a little more insight.

Imagine the people reading your response have little understanding of the topic and would appreciate an explaination vice a retort.

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Gorse

You've seen Khross post before, right?

It's pretty simple. Both sentences' participle phrases are actually functioning as adverbs.

The official isn't 'speaking'; 'speaking' describes how he is revealing.

Likewise, 'after relating' describes when Bob dove.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

If you want the explanation of how this actually works, you can pay me by the hour. The short version is ... gerunds and participles either do not have tense or have extremely special tense rules which are best memorized without consideration of logic or reason. English is a hyper-contextual, post-analytic isolating language. It does things most other languages do not do. It borrows words, rules, and systems from other languages is a way other pseudo-synthetic isolating languages do not. (Seriously, English is **** up and linguists love it. We don't need to get into too much of that).

Now, we can get into the curious effect English as isolating language has had on the world, but ...


The entire phrase has an adverbial function. But the difficulty here comes in the obviation of tenses in English. Gerunds take the perfect-participle and use that to indicate the action in abstract. In the part quoted above, 'speaking' refers directly and specifically at 'the act of speech' in the broadest possible sense. It's operative function is 'why;' further modification by the adverb 'only' and the subordinated adverbial phrase 'under the condition of anonymity' change what the phrase as a whole does. It's an adverb. 'Speaking' has no tense. 'Spoke' would be a true active participle.

'relating an anecdote' is a noun, but it's once again an adverbial phrase in total. The gerund here operates as a noun and once again refers to the action in its abstract state.

Short version: how do you tense an adverb?

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