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

Rolf Furuli furuli at online.no
Thu Sep 21 02:17:07 EDT 2006


Dear Kimmo,

See my comments below.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kimmo Huovila" <kimmo.huovila at helsinki.fi>
To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Cc: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli at online.no>
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects


> 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.

I have not had any bad experiences with modern linguistic theories. They 
have advantages and shortcomings, and realizing this, they can give good 
results in particular areas.
>
> 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?)

To apply modern thories to dead languages are problematic, since we at the 
outset know so little about these languages. Therefore we do not know if 
generative grammar, cognitive grammar, Montague-grammar, and so forth can 
give good results or whether they read into the dead languages values that 
are not there.
>
> 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.

I agree with your words above. When we study a dead language, we must study 
the corpus we have, presumably the whole corpus. I mentioned informants to 
illustrate my point that as long as there are no living beings speaking a 
particular language, we cannot know whether modern linguistic theories can 
be applied to it.
>
> 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.

Your explanation above is to the point, but I disagree with your last 
sentence. I do not see any purpose in predictions of what we should expect 
to find in a dead language if this or that is true. We should only deal with 
the corpus we have. Further, I do not see any need for constructing a theory 
for explanation. For example, when I analyse 997 examples of Hebrew 
imperfect consecutive (WAYYIQTOL), there is no need for a theory to conclude 
from this that imperfect consecutive does not represent grammaticalized past 
tense. The crucial point is whether my analysis is correct, whether most of 
the imperfect consecutives occur in normal contexts and we can see that 
their actions occur after the deictic center. I do not need a theory for 
this either, but I need to state what I view as normal conditions, in order 
to give the reader my points of reference and an opportunity to test my 
conclusions.

Your words indicate that we agree in the following points:

1) The past reference of a Greek verb can indicate that the verb form itself 
represents grammaticalized  past tense, or the past reference is caused by 
the context, to the effect that the form itself does not  represent 
grammaticalized past tense.

2) In order to find out whether the aorists represent past tense or not we 
must analyse the aorists in our corpus in order to see whether there is a 
reasonable number of examples with non-past reference.

Since you speak of the necessity  of "a theory that explains the facts the 
best" I am not sure if you on the basis of a reasonable number of aorists 
with non-past reference (presuming a balanced analysis of them) without 
reservation will conclude that the aorist does not represent grammaticalized 
past tense. I for one will draw such a conclusion without seeking recourse 
in any theory.

The point now is: Let us perform this analysis and see what we get instead 
of entertaining preconceived ideas!

>
> 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
>

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo 





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