[B-Greek] Present & Aorist of general & abstract verbs
Chet A. Creider
creider at uwo.ca
Mon Dec 12 09:19:18 EST 2005
Just in case Rolf doesn't catch the error in his correction for some time:
Rolf Furuli wrote:
> A correction: Tense is the relationship between the deictic center and
> reference time, not between the deictic center and event time.
The original posting was correct in terms of the meaning of the term in
the modern linguistic literature:
"The essential characteristic of the category of tense is that it relates the
time of the action, event or state of affairs referred to in the sentence to
the time of utterance..." (John Lyons, _Intro to Theoretical Linguistics_, 1968)
"Tense relates the time of the situation referred to to some other time,
usually to the moment of speaking." (Bernard Comrie, _Aspect_, 1976)
This definition was first formulated with some rigour by Hans Reichenbach
(_Elements of Symbolic Logic_, 1947). Reichenbach uses three temporal points
E ("point of the event"), R ("point of reference") and S "point of speech"
in order to handle the perfect, past perfect and future perfect tenses in
addition to the past, present and future, but inspection of his diagrams
shows that R (reference time) is only needed for the perfect tenses. This
means that for Reichenbach tense (meaning the distinctions among past,
present and future) is the relationship between the deictic center and
event time. Thus Furuli's original formulation was correct as given.
Furuli defines aspect as "the relationship between event time and reference
time". He may be referring here to the perfect tenses (NB _not_ perfective
aspect), but in terms of the standard aspectual distinction of perfective
vs. imperfective, it is difficult to see how this definition could possibly
work. It may be the point of Furuli's research to show that it does, but
it is not a standard definition of aspect (e.g. Comrie (1976:3) writes,
"aspects are difference ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency
of a situation"; this definition requires neither event time or reference
time).
(Please note that I am not criticizing Furuli's definition of aspect as
applied in his dissertation. It may be successful in that context. I only
wish to point out that it is not a standard definition of aspect.)
Chet Creider
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