File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0110, message 159


From: "Jud Evans" <Jud-AT-sunrise74.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: heidegger-AT-lists.village. Overtness and Covertness.
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 15:04:18 -0000


Re-invigorated by some recent humourful exchanges,  I've been giving more
thought to the ubiquitous existential modalities of our own extantal
imbuancy and that of the observed essivity of the entities and environment
that surrounds us, [which Heidegger confuses as 'Being' ] as mediated by
language and perceived by the selfhood. [dasein].

Do all verbs contain an enshelled hidden copula? Are all verbs pregnant with
essivity? Why do some verbs require the assistance of a separate 'in your
face' overt  'modal processant' ['is' word or 'copula] and others do not?
Why does the sentence: "He is running to meet his mother"   require a
separate overt 'is' - while the sentence which means almost the same thing:
"He runs to meet his mother"  doesn't appear to  have one, though we now
understand that it works with its essivity tagged by the hidden, covert,
enshellment of  the existential modality of the terminal 's'?
We can say : "He is running to meet his mother" but not "He is being to meet
his mother"   Why not? Simply because being is NOT a state,  but is conferal
of stateness on some other action of a entity.

The explanation is that the two sentences have a subtle differences of
meaning for whilst: "He is running to meet his mother"   means that the
action is happening now - at this very  minute and is a continuing state,
the  sentence: "He runs to meet his mother"  can be interpreted by the mind
in two different ways:

(1) He is engaged in the action of running to his mother now.
(2) He is engaged in the action of running to his mother now, BUT he is ALSO
in the habit of running to his mother sometimes - on different occasions.

Back to the question. Why do some verbs require the assistance of a separate
'in your face'  overt  'modal processant' [is word or 'copula] and others do
not? The reason is  that if the 'is' was removed from the sentence:"He is
running to meet his mother"   then the temporal marker of  the present would
go with it  and it would become temporally ambiguous in the sense that we
would be unaware as to whether habituality or existential actuality was
being described.

It is a difficult concept to get one's head around, and perhaps a somewhat
humorous example might help.
Imagine two speakers of another language are standing together watching a
man running past them.

"What he doing?" asks one in fractured English.
"He running to his mother " replies his companion.
"Oh! What he do on other days then?"
"He running to his mother on other days too." says the second man.

We can see the temporal ambiguity exposed.

This raises the question of why is the simple present verb  'runs' equipped
with the 'ever-ready to hand'  enshelled processant 's,'
whereas the poor old present continuous verb running [in spite of its 'ing'
marker of continuity] have to call in and  employ an outside contractor 'is'
word to supply its statehood?  The answer is according to my analysis, that
the mixture of  immediacy and habituality or occassionality exhibited in the
simple present form  'runs' needs to carry its of flexible field Marshall's
baton of essivity  in its corporeal  knapsack for instant use.

Bottom line?
The main reason that English and other languages have an  overt processant
like 'is' and 'being'  to 'service' some verb forms  at all,  is because of
this tension and subtle ambiguity between the existential modality of the
simple present, as opposed to the existential modality  of an entity as
expressed by the continuous tense of any verb.




nomenclature:

Modal Processant: the AITist term for the various forms of the 'BE' cluster.

Overt [Modal] Processant.  - an exposed was,were, is, are,being, or 'will
be' etc in a sentence.

Covert [or 'enshelled] Processant - a hidden marker of existential modality
which is sometimes detectable, as in the terminal's'  of run's' and
sometimes part of the morphological structure of the word itself as with
the 'ew' of the word 'flew' - as in the sentence:
"He flew to meet his mother" where the 'ies' of the simple present 'flies'
changes to the  'ew'  which is the processantal  marker of a past
[completed] modalic existential action.

Cheers,

Jud.





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