[b-hebrew] tenses

Peter Kirk peterkirk at qaya.org
Tue Sep 20 07:57:14 EDT 2005


On 20/09/2005 12:52, Ken Penner wrote:

>Peter wrote:
>
>  
>
>>"Would" NEVER indicates future tense and never has done. This is a 
>>mother tongue speaker telling you that, with support from 
>>several other 
>>mother tongue speakers on this list, as well as from reference books. 
>>    
>>
>
>I think this is stated a bit too strongly. "Would" is considered "posterior
>past" by Hans Reichenbach (Elements of Symbolic Logic, 297), the very man
>responsible for the event model constituted by speech time (S), reference
>time (R), and event time (E). Reichenbach's "posterior" is now generally
>called "relative future tense," in which R precedes E.
>"For the posterior past R-E-S the form 'he would do' is used, for instance
>in 'I did not expect that he would win the race'" (297). Reichenbach also
>gives "he was going to" as a substitute for this use of "would" (298).
>  
>

It may be a "relative future tense", but that is not the same thing as 
the future tense which Vadim keeps going on about.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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