Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

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>