[B-Greek] Present & Aorist of general & abstract verbs

Ken Penner pennerkm at mcmaster.ca
Mon Dec 12 16:31:22 EST 2005


Just to follow up on the statement I made a minute ago, 

> I consider both aspect and relative tense to be related to the E:R
> relationship. Relative tense is the relationship of sequence 
> (precedence),
> and aspect is the relationship of overlap (inclusion).

I should note that my ideas about aspect and relative tense are built on
Binnick's, but are not totally identical. Binnick writes, "Aspect has to do
with the relationship of the event time E to the reference time R;
complexive (perfective) aspect has E within R, imperfective has E and R
overlapping, and perfect has E preceding R" (Time and the Verb, 458). I
would clarify that imperfective can also have (and usually does have) R
totally inside E, and perfective aspect can have E and R not overlapping at
all. 

>From my dissertation:

Th[e] relationship between Event Time and Reference Time must be tagged not
only for sequence (which relates to relative tense) but also for internal
temporal constituency (which relates to aspect). In English, aspect is most
clearly grammaticalized when the internal temporal constituency is made
visible using the verb "be" with the present participle (e.g., "be doing").
The statement, "John read the book," is perfective; "John was reading the
book" is imperfective. The difference is in the event's boundedness. The
statement "John read the book" implies a beginning and end to the reading;
the reading is bounded by these endpoints and the speaker refers to the
whole bounded event from a vantage point outside those boundaries. The
statement, "John was reading the book," implies that the speaker has in mind
only a part of the event; the event may extend before and/or after this
part; the event is unbounded. English has other ways to grammaticalize
unbounded events: the phrases "used to do" "kept doing," "began to do" are
some of the most common ways to express the idea that the event is not a
single bounded event.
I hold that the reference time R is in fact the external vantage point from
which a bounded event is viewed, and the reference time R also delimits the
"part" of an unbounded event the speaker has in mind. Hence, following
Reichenbach, if the event and the reference time do not overlap, the aspect
is perfective.... If the event extends beyond the reference time, the aspect
is imperfective .... 
In the case of perfective aspect, the event frame can fall completely inside
or completely outside the reference frame. In the case of imperfective
aspect, the event frame can extend beyond the reference frame in either or
both directions. Thus there are six types of E:R relationship:
1.	E entirely preceding R ("I have done"); 
2.	E preceding and overlapping the beginning of R ("I have been doing,"
"I stop doing"); 
3.	E entirely encompassing R ("I do"); 
4.	E entirely encompassed by R ("I am doing"); 
5.	E overlapping the end of R and continuing thereafter ("I begin
doing"); 
6.	E entirely subsequent to R ("I will do").
These are simply the six combinations of three relative tenses (the three
precedence relationships between R and E) and the two aspects (whether E
extends beyond R or not).

Ken Penner
Acadia/Greek




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