Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Thank you for your clarification. I am still not quite clear why your 
theory allows for English tenses to be restricted (though 
non-syntactically, if I understand you correctly) by discourse context 
(or higher than clause level context) but has problems with the same 
approach for Hebrew. No doubt I need to go back to Chomsky etc before 
commenting further.

One question still arises. You wrote: "...Within the bounds of regular 
language, a verb form cannot be both X and opposite-of-X within a 
single society's usage.  Of course, someone will immediately throw the 
NT Greek "historic present" at me, found profusely in Mark and other 
places; the question there is, was this a construction that pretty 
much all native Koine speakers considered "good" Greek, or was it an 
occasional syntactic aberration that writers would sometimes use, 
perhaps for the sake of effect (or something similar)?"

Are you saying that (within your favoured theory) any "historic 
present" type construction is necessarily an aberration rather than a 
regular language? The "historic present" is used not only in NT Greek 
but in some English dialects. I think both St. Mark and many of my 
friends would be rather offended if you defined their way of speaking 
and writing as an "aberration". And I suspect that there are languages 
in which a "historic present" type construction is considered 
perfectly normal and correct within certain genres etc of past 
narrative. (Can anyone confirm this?) Is this really what you are 
saying? Why can you not allow that, in the right genre and discourse 
context, a form which is more commonly present can be used with past 
meaning (or vice versa)?

Peter Kirk