relative vs. absolute ex-

[trochee]

due to an almost-entirely-unrelated post by marnanel, I was dragged by my linguistics-brain into a contemplation of the aspectuality of the ex- morpheme.

The following story, drawn from my own life, serves to illustrate:

I met AF in 1996, and we started dating almost immediately. Somewhere in there, she told me about a tradition of her family (the details aren't important); let's call it T. In 1997, we got engaged, and in 1998 we were married. We separated in 1999, and were divorced in 2000. I am now happily (unmarried) with someone else.

But this is where things are complicated. I want to explain that I heard about T from AF, to a friend who does not know AF's relationship to me. Consider these alternatives, with associated bad-ness annotated by stars.

• I heard about T from my ex-wife
• * I heard about T from my wife
• * I heard about T from my future wife
• *? I heard about T from my future ex-wife

The following is extremely nerdy. you have been warned. Really, it only gets worse from here.

I think that most of these are bad because they seem to invoke wrong presuppositions about who I am currently with. But note that the first item (ex-wife) is -- at least under one interpretation -- strictly wrong, because she wasn't my ex-wife at the time. Using wife seems wrong due to the bad presupposition that she is still my wife; using future wife is just confusing. The future ex-wife line is so odd that it might almost be the way to say it, because it forces the listener to examine the presuppositions very carefully.

Amusingly, fiancee is even more startlingly bad:

• * I heard about T from my ex-fiancee [what does this presuppose about our current status?]
• * I heard about T from my fiancee [presupposes current affianced status]
• * I heard about T from my future fiancee [presuppositions suggest currently planning to propose?]
• **? I heard about T from my future ex-fiancee [presuppositions....?]

I think the problem here is that it's difficult to set a particular time of reference in the past. When I refer to ex-wife in that first example, I am referring to her with a sort of current-state situated sense. In the time of reference (before our engagement) the expression "my ex-wife" has no referent. But to a listener who did not have the same facts at her disposal, I might have been referring to acquiring T at a time when that in fact did have a referent.

However, English does a lousy job at distinguishing tense from aspect. Most languages have culturally-determined lexical aspect (Aktionsart) on role-descriptors like "wife", as well. Although it is clear enough from the past tense "heard" that the time of the event hear of T is in the past, "wife" implies a marriage event M and the morpheme "ex-" indicates the occurrence of a particular divorce event D.

But it is completely ambiguous (in language-internal terms) what the relative order of those events is. Pragmatics and cultural knowledge suggests that M < D (which is why "fiancee" comes off so funny in some of those sentences), but it is completely open whether T < D or T < M.

Comments

[evan.livejournal.com]

I started reading the beginning and thinking "aspect" so even though I don't know what that really means I'm glad I saw you thinking the same thing. It was both confusing and very sensible to practice phrases like "I'll call you once I got home" in Japanese.

I wonder if in a language where ex-wife is described in terms of a dependent clause with a verb, like "my [divorced] wife" could allow aspect in there. (I'm thinking of Japanese again, where I remember being married is described in terms of the event of marriage, though I can't remember the exact construction.)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

bingo! Hadn't thought about comparing it to other languages' aspect systems.

I think in Chinese, it would be easy to express the aspect, but not the time (without expressing "six-years-ago", which would have been clunky.

Can't speak for Japanese, but if it's anything like Chinese, expressing the ex- status is fairly straightforward (divorced expressed as a subordinated NP) but getting the relative T < M < D right is hard to do in one simple sentence.

[isolt.livejournal.com]

I heard about T from my then-fiancée and future ex-wife.

This situates her with both respect to past time and present time.. and the worst that could happen is that your interlocutor assumes they are two different individuals.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

not to quibble about the details, but she wasn't even fiancee at the time.

But even so, that's really not felicitous. I think this particular construction is hard to express in English.

I've been trying to think of a role (social or otherwise) that wouldn't have so many presuppositions.

"I heard about T from last night's waiter." Is he still my waiter? Could I have heard about it from him before he waited on my table? Could he have told me, but after he was no longer the waiter? I say the answer to all of these is yes, they could.

This is a complex situation and may be very hard to express in one clause.

[beckyb.livejournal.com]

"When I was first dating my ex-wife, she told me about T."

I guess this gives you a subordinate clause but at least it seems to make sense.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

well rephrased.

It does use more than one clause, but I think that qualifies as "clearest version in English yet".

[beckyb.livejournal.com]

I've been grading a lot of essays lately...

[isolt.livejournal.com]

This is a complex situation

That it is -- and the question of why you feel the need to transmit so much information is a good one.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I was going to suggest to say !
Kinda clunky though for sure !

[ctseawa.livejournal.com]

I usually refer to my 'then now ex-boyfriend' (or something along those lines) when facing this kind of issue.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

that's a novel construction. I wonder how widespread it is.

To me, that's set off by what seems like a parenthetical.

"I heard about T from my future (now ex-) wife".

Complicated, but workable.

For other solutions, look below.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

I think "I heard about T from my ex-wife" suffices because: She is your ex-wife. You heard it from her. It doesn't matter when it was, because you can clarify if people really care, which they probably will not ;).

But, geek away!

[lunacow]

I think I'd have to agree with this, or suggest you go with the less specific "I heard about T from someone I used to be involved with." Not that you are really so much concerned with how to actually express the information. I'm glad you took the time to analyze the complexity of expressing the information -- it's very entertaining!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

you're entirely right.

A sociolinguist -- which I'm not, but I like them and hang out with them when I can -- might ask: "what are the constraints of this situation such that you felt obliged to transmit all this information in one sentence anyway?"

And in truth that's probably a more interesting question for most people.

[kirinqueen.livejournal.com]

This is probably the question I would ask were you asking me to rephrase that information for you. (Not that I myself am a sociolinguist, though it is in truth what I find most interesting.)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

sheesh. I suppose that's a "hard-nosed realist" version of my problem.

you really know how to suck all the fun out of an abstract question of tense aspect and considering-the-alternative-relatively-painless-divorces, dontcha?

:-)

Apparently more people are interested in this subject than I thought!

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Bing bing bing !

Touching on the issue at hand here.... which is...
you never talk about that !

ha ha.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

yeah.

I think the detail that's critical is that I was socio- and para-linguistically ready to share with marnanel and his friends that I had formerly been married, and that was a convenient place to drop that little bombshell.

Extra evidence for this hypothesis: marnanel's wife firinel points out that she did not know that I had been married.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

And you guys have been lj friends a long time no ?

That's interesting. Had not seen that either....

[trochee.livejournal.com]

with firinel since roughly Thanksgiving 2004. I was friends with marnanel long before (a fellow Perl/linguistics geekboy).

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

This did not come to my mailbox...gah lj ...

Unrelated : general_jinjur and I friended you on the same day !

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Um.. .it should have said :
Unrelated :

general jinjur and I friended you on the same day !

[evan.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and if I were carefully saying this I'd use "my to be ex-wife".

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

What about "my former wife?" This implies that she was your wife when you heard about T, but that she is no longer.

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

I mean, does it matter that she wasn't your wife yet when you heard about T?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

In the practical sense? No. In fact, in the context, it's just "I heard about T from someone I used to know".

All this linguistic noodling is just me observing how it's hard to pack all the thoughts into a single sentence.

There's a famous Chomsky decision in early modern linguistics that says "The basic unit of linguistic analysis is the sentence." That assumption is -- like many of Chomsky's linguistic assumptions -- wrong, but methodologically useful, and (now, forty-odd years later) it may need to be discarded. Obviously, this particular bundle of ideas would be easier to express in a larger linguistic unit -- like a paragraph, or a discourse.

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

On the practical question, I have four suggestions:

The underspecified approach:

I heard about T from my ex.
I don't think this creates any particular implicature about whether she was your ex yet when she told you about T, and leaving out the role descriptor sidesteps the matter of whether to identify her according to the relationship you were in at the time or according to your later marriage.

The German-style supersized prenominal modifier approach:

I heard about T from my then not yet affianced ex-wife.

The relative clause cop-out:

I heard about T from a woman to whom I was later briefly married.

The Streetmentioner approach:

I heard about T from my wife-to-have-been.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

I think these work well too !
And while the nerdy inquisition is indeed very entertaining , isn't it ok that we can't pack everything we are trying to say in one sentence ?

That's why we have dialogue no ?

[lapartera.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with imtboo. Why not use more than one sentence? Sheesh! How much does the listener really need to know in one chunk?

This was all very entertaining, but . . . . . . why?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

why not?

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

Ah! The linguist wonders, how much can you do in a single sentence? And the dramatist wonders, why not do it in a dialogue instead? Both good questions, if you ask me....

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Heh heh.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

you have an excellent insight here.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

heh, I had to google the Streetmentioner reference. But it's perfect.

BTW, q_pheevr, you're famous -- Ijust got "Wrathful Dispersion" forwarded to me from one of my non-internet savvy phonology faculty.

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

Hee hee! By the way, if by any chance it was E.K. who sent it to you, tell her I said hi. (We met briefly at NAPhC 1.)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

ah. it was EK indeed. But I don't know *your* name anyway and I don't know if I want to bandy it about that she should snoop your f-list to find my LJ; I occasionally rant about Theory Linguists and I probably shouldn't rock the boat until I've got my degree.

But now I know that she got the link from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

Ah, no need to blow your cover, then. Actually, she didn't get the link from the horse's mouth, and in fact I'm not at all sure she would remember me; I just thought it might be a lark for you to tell her, oh, by the way, the author of that piece (who would prefer to remain [fairly transparently] pseudonymous) recalls having met you at a conference six years ago and sends regards.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

I am very amused by the whole anonymous but broadcast to the whored whirled world dichotomy.
Just sayin'.
;P
( and yes I can wink and stick my tongue out. That's why i went to clown school).