The Proleptic Aorist revisited

Rolf Furuli furuli at online.no
Sun Jun 2 07:44:58 EDT 2002


Dear Iver,


Just some short comments,





>Dear Rolf,
>
>snip
>
>   If it signals past tense this will
>>  *always* be so, except for possible special examples that can be
>>  explained. Because a reasonable number of aorist verbs have future
>>  reference, it is excluded that it can signal past tense, although in
>>  most cases an aorist has past reference.
>
>You seem to say that X is always B, except when it is not. And since Aorist
>sometimes signals future reference, it cannot signal past tense, even though
>it has past reference.
>I am confused.


What I tried to say was the following: If the definition of tense is 
"grammaticalization of location in time", past tense will *always* 
have past reference. However, a small child who used a past tense 
verb wrongly may be quoted, and in that clause it may have another 
time reference. Or, there may be a very special construction where a 
past tense verb have another reference for some obvious reason. I 
will not exclude such situations, but "bought" and "went" will always 
be viewed as verbs signalling past reference and nothing but past 
reference.

>  >
>>
>>  I take issue with the view that the perfective aspect indicates
>>  completedness. This is the case in English but not in Greek.
>
>Well, I wasn't thinking about English, but other languages which have
>perfective aspect.
>
>Please
>>  consider (1) and (2) below
>>
>>  (1) John 11:35 "Jesus wept (AORIST)" or "Jesus burst into tears" or
>>  "Jesus gave way to tears".
>
>Simply an unmarked past tense reference, the narrative past. It is
>completed, because the event is past from the perspective of the story
>teller. The first translation is adequate.

There is no question that the event is completed, we gather this from 
the context. Most aorists have past refererence the situations 
referred to were factually completed at the time they were reported. 
The same is true with imperfects that signal the imperfective aspect. 
The factual completion is not the question, but whether this is 
signalled by the aspect or by the context. If aorist signals 
completed events, this will always be true (with the same possible 
exceptions as mentioned before), but this is not the case.




Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo



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