More on Participles and Time

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Mon Nov 18 20:16:16 EST 2002


If TIME is not a grammatical feature outside the Indicative,
then why is there a Future Participle anyway? For some reason,
I may have misread some Grammar books, but the sense I got was
that TIME is "only" employed in the Indicative, and even there,
Porter says Aspect is Primary.

There are only three aspects (stative, perfective, and imperfective).
So, without a Future Participle, the Greeks had all the Aspects
covered. The Perfect ptc is stative; the Aorist ptc is perfective,
and the Present ptc is imperfective. Why the need for a Future
Participle? (Besides, the aspect of any future tense verbal seems
a bit elusive.)

Granted, there are no Imperfect Tense Participles.

So what are we to make of this? Why a Future but no Imperfect?
Why a duplicate of aspects with the Future and (Aorist or Perfect
or Present)? Is a Pluperfect participle conceivable?

Just looking for more data.

Mark Wilson





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