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b-hebrew - Re[2]: Alviero: tense and time

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  • From: Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG
  • To: furuli AT online.no, b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re[2]: Alviero: tense and time
  • Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 20:52:16 -0500 (EST)



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.

In Russian the clearly past form "poshli", the past tense of the verb
"to go", is used idiomatically with the non-past meaning "let's go!".
But this usage of the past tense is pretty much unique. Does this one
usage make the Russian past tense non-semantic? Is the theory really
that strict?

Is just one non-past wayyiqtol in the whole corpus really sufficient
(quite apart from textual doubts) to invalidate the suggestion that
wayyiqtol is semantically past? Do real human languages really follow
any rules quite that strictly?

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________
Subject: Re: Alviero: tense and time
Author: furuli AT online.no at internet
Date: 24/02/1999 06:29

<long snip>

In the verbal system, (+past) and (+future) are semantic features, while I
am not aware of any language where we find (+present) forms (verbs marked
for present tense). <snip> While verbs unmarked for (+past) or (+future)
can have past, present and future meaning, verbs marked (+past) and
(+future) can *only* have past and future meaning respectively, because
their features represent uncancelable semantic meaning.

In particular syntactic environments, such as irreal conditional clauses
(and others), (+past) verbs may be used in a present or future setting, but
still they are past tense (the English verbs "went" and "thought" will for
instance never change their past meaning).

<snip>







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