Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Ian Hutchesson wrote:



>This is an irrelevant comment on a side issue of the wayyiqtol discussion.
>
>I find there are problems with these descriptive grammarians' views of
>English. For example, in the sentence:
>
>    1) He said he'd been drinking when the accident happened.
>
>how does the "he'd been drinking" fit into the various alphabet soups, ETs,
>Cs etc? Here am I telling you about what Peter told me yesterday. We have
>my shift to the past containing Peter's shift to the past containing a
>still prior situation.
>
>The various attempts to classify the English perfect are usually destined
>to fail when describers try to apply some point to the form, which is
>contrary to its nature. As I understand it the semantic content of the
>English perfect (with one exception) precludes being pinpointed with any
>notion of reference time. These ideas are incompatible. The English perfect
>is related to a reference time, but it conveys the notion of prior to a
>reference time, so that





>
>>(1c) At sunrise Peter will have arrived.
>
>is for me clearly astandard English. (Other people's views on the matter
>would be welcomed.) I don't understand what is being conveyed in the
>statement. The best I can make out is:
>
>    2a) By sunrise Peter will have arrived.
>
>ie, prior to the time referenced by sunrise. I don't think this was intended:
>
>    2b) At sunrise Peter will arrive.
>
>but, as I said, a point in time precludes the perfect. The one exception
>deals with the "Past Perfect", which in English is an ambiguous form.
>Consider:
>
>    3a) She said, "I've seen Peter."
>    3b) She said, "I saw Peter this morning."
>
>and let's report these:
>
>    3c) She said she'd seen Peter.
>    3d) She said she'd seen Peter that morning.
>
>English is unable to supply a consistent form to cover the past past of 3d.
>In some languages there is a different form for each of the verbs found in
>the Past Perfect here, 3d being represented by the "pluperfect" in some
>languages. (Italian now has the vestiges of such a system with its
>"trapassato prossimo" and "trapassato remoto".) The following needs a clear
>context to render it acceptable in English:
>
>>(1d) At sunrise Peter had arrived.
>
>The reason why there is so much trouble with grammar and why it has stopped
>being taught in schools is that late Restoration scholars attempted to
>shoehorn English into Latin descriptive grammar formats which turned out to
>be inadequate. Just for example Latin had three tenses while English has
>only two, a past (marked form) and a non-past, and that "past tense" is
>also used as an unreal marker (along the lines of a subjunctive)! This is a
>case of using a square peg to fit a round hole.
>
>    4) Were I free to choose, I'd live in Tahiti and work on the internet.
>
>Just a rerun on the English perfect: it is analogous in operation to the
>any/some system. "Some" indicates definite quantity while "any" deals with
>potential quantity. In past situations the "past tense" deals with a
>definite time and event, whereas the "present perfect" deals with
>establishing a definite event, eg
>
>    5a) Have you seen Doctor Strangelove?
>
>ie is there such a past?
>
>    5b) No, I haven't.
>
>ie there is no past.
>
>    5c) Yes, I saw it years ago.
>
>and we've established the event. Naturally this is shortened response, a
>longer response being:
>
>    5d) Yes, I have. I saw it years ago.
>
>and immediately shift to the definite event form. You can see that the
>perfect is ideal for introducing new information about an event.
>
>    "Here is the latest news: Boris Yeltsin has just resigned.
>     His decision was based on the realisation of his fundamental
>     failure to come to grips with reality..."
>
>Under normal circumstances applying the notion of a "point in time" (or any
>other term for locating the action contained therein) to the English
>perfect is patently wrong. Even the term "perfect" applied to it is
>inappropriate, considering:
>
>    6a) He's run four kilometres.
>    6b) He's been running.
>    6c) *He's been running four kilometres.
>
>
>Be it sufficient to say that an English perfect related to any event at any
>given reference time will supply some "before that time" information.
>
>    "I came to Italy in 1984. I hadn't studied the language and
>    couldn't speak a word."


Dear Ian,

English perfect has been treated in different ways in the linguistic
literature. In the book "A Semantic and Pragmatic Model of Lexical and
Grammatical Aspect", New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., Mari
Broman Olsen has made a coherrent picture of all the English tenses and
aspects, including perfect, which she takes as the perfective aspect. I
recommend this book.

Your objections to applying perfect to a point of time are logical if it is
an aspect. However, in combination with tense, perfect is used as the
perfective aspect to show a coda view of an event,i.e. the event held at
the coda and was terminated. Which conclusions can we draw from (1)? Simply
that the "come-event" has terminated and that Ian is here.


(1) Ian has come.

(2) At sunrise Peter will have arrived.

(3) By sunrise Peter will have arrived.


You are correct when you say that my example, repeated in (2) is incorrect.
Thank you for the correction! Your example (3) is, on the other hand, good
English. The safest way to choose one's examples, is to take them from
published scholarly works. There are at least two dangers in creating
examples ad hoc in a discussion which proceeds quickly.

(a) When you are not a native speaker, you do not have a good intuition and
can make errors; to choose the right prepositions across language borders
is particularly difficult.

(b) You do not have time to look at your example from all angles, and there
may turn out to be some drawbacks with it.

However, examples that rightly can be criticized to not weaken the model
that is used, and there is no doubt in my mind that English perfect can be
used in a systematic way to describe the English verbal system, and that
Broman Olsen's model is an important tool to that effect.





Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo