Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Ian,

Thank you for your observations. I give a few remarks below:



IH
>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.

RF
By your (1c) you show explicitly that (1b) is contunuous. Does this
contradict Broman Olsen's model of perfect as perfective? No. Broman Olsen
would analyze (1b) and (1c) as (C=RT, +imperfective, +perfective). She
quoted Quirk,R.,Greenbaum,S.,Leech,G., and Svartvik,J., 1985, "A
Comprehensive grammar of the English language", London: Longman, p 210:

"/W/hen the perfective and progressive aspects are combined in the same
verb phrase (e.g.has been working), the features of meaning associated with
both of them are also combined. Nevertheless, the perfective progressive
has a semantic range that is not entirely predictable from the meaning of
its components."

According to Broman Olsen's model the meaning *is* predictable. To use a
little of the "alphabet soup" the imperfective perfective forms implies
that ET intersects RT both at the nucleus and at the coda. She wrote (p
192): "/+ imperfective,+perfective/ aspect marked on a single form asserts
that a situation is first ongoing and then completed, all during the RT."


IH
>>(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.

RF
Broman Olsen (and myself) would analyse (3) as future perfective (C>RT,
+perfective).


IH
>Just out of curiosity how does the tool -- if it is indeed this which
>supplies your time reference system -- handle
>
>  (4)   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.)

RF
(4) consiste of three clauses: (1) "He said", (2) "(that) he had been
drinking", and (3) "when the accident happened".
If we change the direct speech, we get:
(5) He said:"I was drinking when the accident happened."

In contrast with Reichenbach and Comrie, who always take ST (speech time)
as C (the deictic point) in the simple tenses, Broman Olsen gives evidence
that C must be pragmatically determined, though the default is ST. In (5) I
would take ST as C. The main clause "He said" is simple past, and we get
the formula (RT>C). For the first dependent clause we get a new C connected
with the saying-incident. Thus ET is the drinking-incident and the accident
is RT. The expression "was drinking" is past progressive and this means
that we have an intersection of of ET with RT at the nucleus, i.e. the
drinking-incident held when the accident happened (the "when-clause" serves
just as an adverbial). The formula is (RT>C,+imperfective)

Example (4) which can be transformed into (5) without any loss of meaning,
can also be said to be equivalent with (6).

(6) He said: "at seven o´clock yesterday I was drinking.

The phrase "was drinking" is past progressive in relation to "He said", and
"He said" is simple past in relation to a C that must be pragmatically
fixed.



Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo