Discourse function of Imperfective Tense (Mark: 1:4-8)
Moon-Ryul Jung
moon at sogang.ac.kr
Mon Dec 30 01:44:46 EST 2002
[Iver]
> The setting of time is a discourse feature and not a sentence feature. A
> discourse unit normally covers a number of sentences, and I would expect the
> time to be set by some temporal expression at the outset of the discourse.
> Once a time reference is set, it remains in force until another time is set
> by a different temporal expression. Aorist verbs then describe the various
> events in consecutive order.
Aha! Now I see what you are saying. But as far as I know, the standard
treatment of the reference time says:
(1) Every statement has the reference time with respect
to which the statement is made.
(2) If a sentence has a temporal adverbial, that defines the reference
time.
If a sentence does not have a temporal adverbial, the statement
denoted by the sentence has the reference time determined by
the context.
According to this treatment, whenever a sentence with the aroist describe
an event, the reference time of the next sentence is considered to be
the time point or interval after that event. This view helps understand
what is going on in the following example:
At 10, he arrived at the hotel. He entered the room. It was dark.
Here the reference time for the statement of "it was dark" is considered
to be the time point after he entered the room. It does not make sense
to say that the reference time of "it was dark" is the time set by the
temporal adverbial "at 10". There may be other ways to explain the
phenomenon.
But the treatment I described is standard especially in "computational
discourse
analysis".
In short, in this analysis, the reference time is a feature or parameter
of the statement or proposition denoted by a sentence. But I think we can
posit two kinds of reference time, one the discourse reference time and
the other the sentence reference time.
Moon
Moon
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