Finegan Ch. 6

It's kind of hard for me to retell these chapters that just go through language feature after language feature.  I do think they are important, and they are interesting to read about, but it's hard to figure out how to synthesize all the info into something cohesive.  :)

It is pretty amazing that all this stuff has very specific names.  I guess thinking about the specifics of language semantics is good for an ESL teacher, because having an understanding of why something is wrong or right about a sentence makes it much easier to assist ELLs in their language acquisition (or learning  :)  ).  Not that you would necessarily teach specific semantic terms to a student, but you might have a good understanding to be able to better explain why some forms are appropriate for a certain context.

And I was surprised to read that some languages just have a "nonpast" or "nonfuture" tense marker, rather than distinct past, present, and future tenses.  That seems really confusing.  I guess the adverbs save the day, though.  :)