Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Read, James C [mailto:K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk] 
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)

JCR:

eg I go swimming every morning. Now is afternoon and so I am not
swimming.
This morning I swam and tomorrow I will swim again. Action refers to
past
and future but not present.

Or as my son told me when I bewailed my inability to solve this one,
"These things skip a generation, Dad" . . .


4. -+-  events/actions/states entirely in the deictic present

JCR:

Now this one is completely impossible. Think about it! 

Quite right. I think most languages and linguists fudge by treating the
present as a sort of fuzzy blob rather than a point.