Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Stoney Breyer" <stoneyb AT touchwood.net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Vadim Cherny [mailto:VadimCherny AT mail.ru] 
Tense describes the reference time from narrator's point of view.

That is to say, future tense must refer to the future from the
narrator's
deictic centre, and past tense likewise.

Now, narrator's deictic centre might be shifted, and so future tense
sometimes refers to the past events - from the point of view of the
reader
or of narrator's contemporaries. This is still future tense.

Does that seem reasonable?


SB: Perfectly reasonable. And how many tenses do you recognize? Working
from the past/present/future paradigm I see at least eight tenses which
must be taken into account:

1. +--  events/actions/states entirely in the deictic past 
2. ++-  events/actions/states commencing in the deictic past and
persisting into the deictic present
3. +++  events/actions/states commencing in the deictic past and
persisting into the deictic future
4. -+-  events/actions/states entirely in the deictic present
5. -++  events/actions/states commencing in the deictic present and
persisting into the deictic future
6. --+  events/actions/states entirely in the deictic future
7. +-+  events/actions/states in the deictic past and the deictic future
but not in the deictic present (I find this one very hard to imagine,
but I put it in for logical completeness)
8. ---  events/actions/states unmarked for tense (null-tense or
infinitive)

Does that seem reasonable?