Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Peter, 
> 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.

No, I didn't say that English tenses can be restricted non-
syntactically.  The tense says what it says and has its syntactic 
markings.  Larger considerations, such as sequence, are 
determined by the discourse context, but this doesn't affect the 
syntactic force of the English tense.  They're two very different 
things.  Also, such things as selectional restrictions are part of the 
syntax of the verb in question and hence will appropriately restrict 
the tenses.

> 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)?

This gets into the question of dialects and sub-dialects again, and 
with the email back-up that I currently have I'm not able to pursue 
that.  Let me just toss this out: when an English speaker uses this 
"historic present" as in the example you gave before, the average 
listener has to do some "extra processing" to put the present-tense 
clause into the context of the past-tense narrative; it isn't within the 
bounds of what the majority of English speakers and listeners 
would call "natural" constructions in their language on a syntactic 
level.  Even though it is understood (eventually) and possibly even 
used at some point, that doesn't make it part of the natural 
language as spoken by the vast majority of people for whom 
English is a first language.  Dialects are a whole new kettle of fish 
from the POV of syntax etc. and a lot has been written on the 
subject.  However, I would argue that it is not enough simply to say 
"somebody says it that way, so it must be well-formed."  There 
must be some guidelines of some kind for determining what is a 
well-formed clause and what isn't, or we end up back with Humpty 
Dumpty.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.