RandallButh wrote:this is not reliable since these two systems are independent of each other.
au contraire, independent systems are what is needed in order to provide evidence that is not inherently circular.
The meaning of a word like αὔριον 'tomorrow' can be determined by description and usage. It might then serve diagnostically with verb forms. Do aorist and imperfect indicatives never collate in the same clause with αὔριον? Well, that is an important datum. And a Greek grammarian from 2000 years ago thought so, too.
Indeed. I don't disagree with that. It is only your selective quoting of my words that makes it look like I do.
The neglected portion of what I said:
MAubrey wrote:but the converse would be theoretically and descriptively risky.
Temporal adverbs can certainly be used with great success. But it is precisely because they are an independent system that makes them more complicated and nuanced in approaching the analysis. Their use is
risky without explicit controls and evaluation of the entire system of temporal adverbs as a whole.
Rod Decker's monograph/dissertation used temporal adverbs to argue precisely the opposite of what you (and I) hold about tense in Greek precisely because he (in my opinion) made the mistaken of thinking a temporal adverb system should have a one-to-one correlation with the tense system. He then drew the conclusion that because a one-to-one correlation does not exist, tense does not exist.
My point is that the relationship between temporal adverbs and tense system is complicated and needs to be approached with great care in the analysis. That is all.
Ken M. Penner wrote:MAubrey wrote:it would be an acceptable approach to evaluate the meaning of temporal adverbials on the basis of tense, but the converse would be theoretically and descriptively risky.
Just to clarify in simple English, let me use an example.
Given that we see a correlation of "will do" with "tomorrow" and "did" with "yesterday," are you saying it's okay to use "will do" to tell us what "tomorrow" means and "did" to figure out what "yesterday" means, but it's not okay to use "tomorrow" to figure out what "will do" means and "yesterday" to figure out what "did" means?
No. I'm not talking about particular adverbs, for one. I'm saying that temporal adverbs are not always a reliable guide because they can conflict with tense (see above). Adverbs like "now" are far more fluid, even in English. What I'm trying to emphasize is that something that is self-evident in one language (like English here) is not necessarily self-evident in another language. There are languages where even adverbs like yesterday and tomorrow function independently (e.g. Hindi) of tense (Bhat 1999, 40-42). My initial comment was one about grammatical analysis in relationship to language typology. We cannot rely on adverbials to do the same thing every time, whether that's another language, or even another tense or adverbial.
I hope that's a little more clear...