[B-Greek] Are there any aspect only languages?
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Wed Sep 20 04:35:30 EDT 2006
Don ERWTHSE
>B-Greekers:
Are there, in fact, any modern languages which are aspect only (i.e.,
whose verbs are grammaticalized for aspect only and all temporal
placement is handled otherwise--use of adverbs, etc.)?>
This is a good question and tricky to answer. The literature is filled
with labels that reflect different levels of reality and reference.
Back around 1980 I read Comrie's book on aspect and had the resources
to check up on the African languages. I found out that languages that
were named 'aspectual' had time constraints in the verb system anyway.
E.g., Hausa. It appears that if a verb system was quite different from
English or French it got labelled 'aspectual'. I also knew many SIL
people working on lesser-known languages in Africa, I couldn't find a
'pure aspect' language. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. However,
there is a logical constraint that comes into play.
The semantic pie of reality and the need to refer to all manners of
events is the same across humankind. The number of verbal categories
that may be used to reference this pie are different across languages,
of course. It is the number of 'slices' that determines in a large
measure just how defined and separate the categories will be or how
mixed. Around this same time Bickerton was publishing on creole
languages and others were working on child learning stages. I believe
that Derek Bickerton showed that aspect was the first among "Tense,
Mood, Aspect" to be grammaticalized in creole and early child
language. Time was a slower category to develop with children, if I
remember correctly. However, if other categories were not
morphologically developed, then that proto-aspectual system had to do
work for Mood and Time as well, producing a time-aspect-mood mix.
Bickerton chided linguists who forget the basic pie constraint in
their work (he included Comrie).
You can see all of this working almost predictably in Hebrew. It has a
basic two-way morphological split in the verb system (plus an
additional sequential system that maintains that two-way split) plus
an intruding participle that entered the system already in the
classical biblical period (contrary to a sister language, Arabic,
where one of the two verb categories covers the basic present tense
participle system of bHebrew. [ in bHebrew, you don't say *ere et
ha-shulHan 'I see the table' for something actually present, but you
may ask ha-tire et ha-shulHan 'would you/do you see the table?'.])
Following the work of Bhat 1999, one may recognize that the bHebrew
system grew out of a pre-Hebrew aspectual dichotomy. However, the verb
system as far back as we can attest functions for time, too. Thus,
bHebrew, like Greek, does not have either "*maHar pa`al" or
"*vayyif`al maHar" 'he did tomorrow' or 'and he did tomorrow'. So when
someone like Porter claims in his large tome on Greek aspect that
Hebrew supports a tenseless language approach, it simply means that he
was following the metalanguage of most books in Europe on Hebrew where
the majority call Hebrew 'an aspect language'. Hebrew is very
non-IndoEuropean, but it includes time contraints and produces a
morphologically-'simple', semantically-mixed, 'tense-aspect-mood'
system. Quite Bickertonian. As a Hebraist I can only smile when
someone tells me that bHebrew was '*pure aspect'. (Sort of like if
someone were to say that English does not mark 'past'.) The
tense-aspect mix is inadvertantly metaphored in the Jouon-Muraoka
grammar where Jouon (1923) labelled yif`al 'future' but the pa`al he
labelled 'perfect'. Muraoka kept the ironic inconsistency in the
English update (1991?). (Kurylowicz 72, a Slavist acquainted with
multifaceted aspectual frameworks, was also happy in saying that
Semitic languages were not pure aspects.)
John Cook published a study study on bHebrew a few years ago arguing
that Hebrew was an aspect-primary language. He also argued that Hebrew
did not grammaticalize tense until after biblical Hebrew. However, he
used Bhat and did what Bhat said not to do with his system. Don't
press it into specifics because it is only valid in broad strokes.
[You will already be aware that Rolf, on this list, has presented his
statistics which 'prove' that all of the above can't be. But the
statistics were gathered and presented thru his analytical grid, and
he has 'scientifically' removed the sequential system, contrary to
ancient attestation and the unbroken user community. (bHebrew has
always been in use, even if as a second language.)]
Sorry, to get off on Hebrew on the Greek list. It doesn't belong here
but it is often alluded to as a 'pure aspect' language. It surely
wasn't/isn't. At best someone might point to the above discussion and
argue that it is debateable. Fine. Until you want to use it. Then you
better pay attention to attestation patterns and stay within them,
explaining them however you will. (And recognize when and if you want
to neologicise.)
BTW, if someone wants to bring up a 'pure aspect' language, besides
going elsewhere than Greek or Hebrew, they must ALSO show that the
verb is morphologized with personal concord. I don't know Chinese, but
I don't think that it has a personal concord system within the verb.
Greenberg only proposed that verbs relate to Tense-aspect-mood
semantics, when they also inflect with a personal concord system (1p,
2p, 3p, or whatever mix and cut). With 6000+ languages out there,
there are certain to be some anomalies. But the 'pie constraint'
coupled with verbal personal concord appears to have remarkable
predictable power.
ERRWSO
Randall Buth
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com
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