present active indicative

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Mon Mar 12 20:52:16 EST 2001


Ron:

You wrote:

---------
>My question deals with the impact the mood has on the tense. Does the
>indicative alter the normal force of the present tense? For instance, this
>comment was made by a gentleman: "Observing that in the present indicative
>no clear distinction can be drawn between ongoing action and so-called
>'punctiliar' action as is possible in the imperfect and aorist
>indicative.." he then quotes A.T. Robertson (p. 864).
--------

I may not understand your question. You ask if the Indicative "alters" the 
normal force. To me, to "alter" something means to change it from state A to 
state B. But the Present Tense / Indicative Mood is all part of the same 
morphological ending, is it not? In other words, you can not have a Present 
Tense, then ADD an Indicative to it, thereby altering its original meaning. 
Once you encode the Present Tense, you have encoded the Mood as well.

But I think it is true that the Present Tense itself, in any Mood, does NOT 
denote "ongoing" or "punctiliar" action. That would be determined by the 
nature of the word being used (lexeme, i.e., Lexical Aspect), as well as the 
context, as you say.


Then, you ask:

-------
>This is followed by (in the following paragraph), "Thus, while it is true
>that in moods other than the indicative the present tense denotes
>continuing action, in the indicative mood itself no distinction can be
>drawn from the mood between the action which is continuing and the action
>which is not."
------

No. I do not think the Mood contributes to a word's Lexical Aspect. I can 
think of plenty of Subjunctive Mood / Present Tense verbs that are NOT 
continuing action.

I think I have somewhat missed the force of your questions. Keep an eye out 
for other responses.

My thoughts,

Mark Wilson




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