tense/mood

yeah, confusing; there’s actually yet another tense/mood-like type of language object that linguists like to talk about: “aspect”, which is, i suppose, more tense-like than mood is. it’s pretty tricky to explain to western european language speakers what an aspect is; those languages don’t have aspect. fortunately, since you know chinese, it’s easy: chinese doesn’t have tenses, so all your favorite particles that affect the meaning of verbs (like “le”, the “past tense” of mandarin) are either moods or aspect words…. now that you know what a mood is (“ma” (question marker), for example, is a mood marker), all the ones that aren’t moods are aspect markers.

lisa, feel free to put the smack down; i have a linguistics degree, but my focus was much more on semantics and computational issues than on good ‘ol “what do we call this damn stuff” linguistics.