Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

A few comments:

On 31 Jan 2010 at 19:00, James Christian wrote:

> But surely you can see that the examples of the various uses of
> 'went' show
> that neither tense nor aspect is uncancellable.
> 
> (1) Yesterday I went to the shop to buy a sandwich
> 
> This use shows past tense and perfective aspect
 
> (2) Sally went to the shop every day of her life
> 
> This use is both referring to the past and is imperfective in aspect
> (action
> was repeated)
> 
> (3) As I went to the shop I saw a man talking to a woman
> 
> This use is referring to the past and is imperfective in aspect
> (action is
> ongoing). We can substitute 'went' with 'was going' with very
> little
> difference to the logical inferences the utterance stimulates.

These are all clearly past tense.  If you want to make your case as I 
understand it,  you 
need to come up with an example that isn't.  I haven't seen one so far.
 
> (4) If I went to the shop I would buy an ice-cream
> 
> This use is referring to hypothetical event in the future with
> perfective
> aspect
> 
> (5) If I went to the shop every day like Sally does I'd soon get
> bored of
> going to the shop
> 
> This use is referring to hypothetical events both past, present and
> future
> that are repeated i.e. imperfective in aspect. If we changed this
> conditional into logical inferences that could be made when its
> truth
> conditions are satisfied one of the inferences we could make is 'I
> go to the
> shop every day like Sally.' i.e. verb form becomes present simple
> (expressing repeated actions in past, present and future; aspect
> is
> therefore imperfective.

These are both subjunctive,  which in English is actually a distinct 
grammatical function 
although it uses an identical form.  So these examples don't really do 
anything for your case 
as technically they are something different from simple past forms.
 
> And so we can conclude that neither tense nor aspect is
> grammaticalised in
> the English 'simple past' verb forms.

Aspect, perhaps not (I won't comment at this point).  But you have not shown 
that the 
"simple past" form of English doesn't grammaticalize tense.  All the examples 
you gave are 
in fact past tense, and your two other examples are subjunctive form, not 
past.  So this does 
not make your case.

Since I don't know Italian, I won't comment on those, either.

[snip]
Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur