Alviero: tense and time

Rolf Furuli furuli at online.no
Wed Feb 24 15:54:50 EST 1999


Dear Peter,


>In Turkish there is a present tense, a past tense, a future tense, and
>a "broad" ("genish") tense (sometimes confusingly called "aorist", but
>nothing like the Greek aorist) - there are also various other compound
>tenses. The "broad" tense can be present, future, or applicable at all
>times e.g. in proverbs. It is also morphologically the simplest, the
>others have distinct present, past and future morphemes. This looks to
>me like an example in which the present tense is just as marked as the
>past and future. You may at least like to look into this and see how
>it fits with the theory.

Broman Olsen (1997:130) writes: "In Dahl's /"Tense and Aspect systems"/
(1985) survey of 64 languages, no language marks simple present tense
morphologically; that is, no language has a form which has semantically
uncancellable present reference ( and no other function)."
Looking at Dahl's work, I found that he included Turkish, and he gives the
following information:
Turkish
Suffix-yor
Aorist
Past Definite
Future
Past Predicative Suffix
Reportative mood



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