Discourse function of Imperfective Tense (Mark: 1:4-8)

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Mon Dec 30 05:42:34 EST 2002


Hi, Moon,

We may be moving too much into various schools of discourse linguistics, so
I'll only make a brief comment on your example below which may still be
relevant to Greek tenses:

> 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 aorist 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.

Your last sentence is not on the story-line, but is a background
description. This would require an imperfect tense in Greek. The Greek verb
EIMI has no aorist, since it never is used for a story-line verb. The lack
of an aorist of EIMI is best explained from a discourse perspective.

It is difficult to give a proper explanation of discourse and time reference
in an e-mail, and as you say there are different linguistic theories. I
found it interesting to study an African language where all story-line verbs
are tenseless. Once the time is given in the setting, the story-line events
progress consecutively without tenses. As soon as you move away from the
story-line, either into the background or a flashback, a tense marker is
needed in order to break the flow.

Iver Larsen




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