Talk:Relative and absolute tense

Slight error in final paragraph
In the context of the sentence "John said that he would come to the party," the article says that if English used relative tense, the sentence would be "John said that he will come to the party" because "come" is later than "said." This is not the true reason, since in that sentence, "come" is an auxiliary verb within the phrase "will come." The reason is simply that the action happened later than the time at which it was discussed. I will change the sentence in the article to reflect that.

Benzi (talk) 02:48, 10 May 2008 (UTC)


 * That's exactly what it said. 'Come' is not an aux. verb. kwami (talk) 23:15, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Mood?
Isn't 'would' a subjunctive verb? 75.72.21.38 (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 22:43, 7 October 2008 (UTC).
 * i was wondering this too 68.199.242.60 (talk) 22:29, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Merge?
I see that has proposed a merge between Relative and absolute tense and Sequence of tenses. I'm not sure I'll be able to see the point without some help. The topics are indeed related, but one of them is a general semantic one that has to do with the way the temporal reference of tenses is (or isn't) anchored in the moment of utterance, while the other seems to me like a syntactic phenomenon operating at the level fo the linkage of clauses. I can't really imagine a picture of how a joint article can be constructed. – Uanfala 22:23, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Closed, given the lack of support. Klbrain (talk) 03:42, 31 December 2018 (UTC)