Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Rolf,

Thanks for your response. I hope you didn't my previous post as a
criticism. I strongly believe that the vast majority of English speakers at
at a great disadvantage regarding an understanding of grammar when compared
with European education. Grammar isn't taught in schools in Anglo-Saxon
countries and it shows when they come to Europe to get jobs as teachers of
English. Children in Europe are grammatically parsing sentences at thirteen.

My theoretical grammar reading is now quite dated. It ran the gamut from
Lyons to the transformationalists. From the universal linguists like Comrie
and Chomsky (!) to the case grammarians such as Ferguson. From the
componential analysts and computer linguists to the semantico-syntactic
approach. So I've got a lot of bs spinning through my head on grammar.

But I cut my linguistic teeth in an English teaching classroom, where a
pragmatic approach to grammar was fundamental -- and of course one really
needed to know what things meant. One small fruit of this situation is a
very strong understanding of how the English verb system (excluding the
"modal" subsystem) worked, an overview of which can be summarized very
simply (though with the inadequacies of a Latin dependent terminology):

                Unmarked    Marked
---------------------------------------------
  tense         simple      past             
  complete      simple      continuous  (= incomplete)
  at ref. time  simple      perfect (= prior, but tied to rt)
---------------------------------------------

There are provisos to the above of course due to purely semantic
considerations, but all the so-called English tenses are combinations of
these simple concepts. (That which one wants to call "future tenses" in
English are merely periphrastic means of referring to the future using
non-past forms, often involving modal verbs -- as is the case with other
Germanic languages.)

>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. 

While I accept this approximation as reasonable, it seems to be purely a
descriptive grammarian's attempt at getting some angle of the use of a
difficult to describe English verb form, an angle implied by the priorness
of the English perfect.

>Which conclusions can we draw from (1)? Simply
>that the "come-event" has terminated and that Ian is here.
>
>(1) Ian has come.

The termination though is not supplied by the perfect, but by the
non-continuous form of the verb. Consider:

  1b) He has been working on his magnum opus.
  1c) He has been working on his magnum opus all day.

There is no termination involved: we just know from the perfect that what
is being described is before now and the continuous (ie not the unmarked
form) tells us that it is incomplete.

>(2) At sunrise Peter will have arrived.
>
>(3) By sunrise Peter will have arrived.

It is worthwhile to understand why #2 doesn't work. I think my simple
distinction makes this clear. The use of the modal for a periphrastic
future doesn't change the impact of the analysis. Modal verbs tend to be
additive to the system I have described, making a fourth dimension so to
speak.

>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.

Just out of curiosity how does the tool -- if it is indeed this which
supplies your time reference system -- handle

     He said he'd been drinking when the accident happened.

given that I'm relating a past in which someone else is relating a past in
which something happened prior to that past. (And if Galia is reading I
wonder how the system she advocates dealls with it.)


Cheers,


Ian

Sorry to all if this is deemed off-topic. I will certainly stop if necessary.