[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects

Kimmo Huovila kimmo.huovila at helsinki.fi
Tue Sep 19 13:13:12 EDT 2006


Dear Rolf,

Too bad you have had such a bad experience with modern grammatical theories 
and theoretical linguistics. I have had my bad experiences, but then I am not 
too concerned with those particular theories. I just move on to more 
promising approaches. There is plenty of good stuff out there to choose a 
good tool for analysis, even if there are dead ends, too. A linguist can 
ignore modern linguistics only to his loss.

If a linguistic framework is incapable of yielding good analyses of modern 
languages, why try it on a dead one? Methodology should be tested on living 
languages.

We face exactly the same dilemma of conditionals in Greek as in English, which 
is a living language. How would you go about proving from a corpus that 
English has a past tense? (Would you agree it has?)

Native language intuition is not the only, or even always the best source of 
information. There is the familiar phenomenon when a native informant claims 
that some structure is unacceptable and ungrammatical, and then he is 
caught using it himself repeatedly (not just an occasional mistake). Which has 
priority, his native intuition, or the corpus he produces? While the 
intuition is interesting, I would tend to go with corpus data. That reveals 
how people speak (or write) even if they deny it. If corpus linguistics has 
priority even with a living language, we may not be that much theoretically 
handicapped when dealing with a dead language if the coprus is (were) good 
enough. Even native intuition is build being exposed to lots of corpora in 
everyday life.

The value of informants is the greatest when trying to learn the basics of a 
language. When you already have a good feeling for the language, corpora (if 
you have good ones) become more important for many analyses. But, of course, 
it is always nice to be able to consult native intuition, or to be much more 
safe, many people with native intuition (it is amazing how often natives will 
disagree about their own language, each being very certain about their 
position).

How do we distinguish between past tense and past reference? If the form is 
used only with past reference, then it is a past tense (but it may be more 
than that, like the Greek aorist signals aspect). If there are contexts where 
it does not have a past reference, there are two options. Either it is not a 
past tense, but something else that can explain the patterns of occurrence 
better, or the past tense meaning is negated in some contexts (like 
conditionals, historical presents). It is a matter of constructing the best 
theory that explains the facts the best, including both attested and 
unattested sentences.

In the spirit of cognitive grammar or prototype theory, I would try to see the 
typical patterns. But also I would try to see how the typical patterns relate 
to each other and perhaps form more abstract shemata that will explain the 
different prototypical cases. And I would study exceptions and see how they 
can be made a natural part of the model.

Kimmo Huovila

On Monday September 18 2006 21:28, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> Dear Kimmo,
> 
> While I have nothing against cognitive grammar, I do not see how it can help 
> us answer the basic questions of Greek grammar. It is my experience that 
> modern grammatical theories and theoretical linguistics tend to disturb the 
> study of dead languages rather than being helpful tools. These are helpful 
> for modern languages where the native speakers already know how tense and/or 
> aspect are expressed in their language. But they are of very little use when 
> informants are lacking. The basic question in this discussion has been: Is 
> the Greek aorist a past tense or not? In order to work towards an answer I 
> have an even more fundamental question: How do we distinguish between past 
> tense and past reference? Is the only criterion our gut feeling, or can we 
> work out scientific parameters by which we can make a systematic test of the 
> language?



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