Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

karl,

>>> You’re going to have to define “tripartite”, because the definitions I was taught since grade school say that not only are there three concepts of time—past, present and future—but that they have subsets.

this is a grade school simplification: some english grammatical forms cannot be assumed any of these three TEMPORAL values: past, present or future. the common classification by three TENSUAL values: past, present or future does not satisfy, by and large, rolf's definition of a
tense. for this reason, he classifies english (i assume) as aspectual.
below i give the example of the future perfect.

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discussion
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 the BHVS enigma is not whether the verb forms express "tense" (in the sense of absolute past, present and future): i believe we all agree on this point. the BHVS enigma is what sense we can give the verb forms so that the structure of the clause will be predictable, given context.

at issue here is the word "grammaticalization" if verb forms  can be attributed verb semantics, in a consistent way, so that the same context type and TAM type would ALWAYS produce the same verb form.

>>> If you try to maintain that each of the tripartites are monolithic, I don’t know of any who would support that idea as other than fiction.

no, i accept subdivisions, but i rather refer to past/future overlaps, e.g. in the future perfect "tense".

>>> First of all, the English “will have done” is still future. While it may indicate the order of events to come, it’s still in relation to the present concerning events not yet happened, i.e. future. 

plain wrong! see examples below.

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analysis:
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in english, "will have done" is grammaticalized, in the sense that it always indicates the same temporal type: an action B completed before an action A in the future. note that it is inaccurate to say that action B itself is in the future, nor
that it is in the past. all you can say is that action B is prior to action A.

example: "when tut's grave will be opened, it will have been ransacked."

the ransacking could have occurred a hundred years ago, or tomorrow (say, if the speaker were medieval).

another example: "By the time Achyles reaches the finish line tomorrow, the turtle will have already arrived".

action A: simple future (will be opened).

action B (will have been ransacked/ will have arrived) : there is no way to conclude it is future.
all you can conclude is that action B took place prior to action A. actually, tut's grave may have been ransacked centuries ago.  and, if the race started two days ago, maybe the turtle has arrived yesterday.

so, what to do? an easy way out is to say that "will have /will have been" is not a tense: it can be both past or future.

but there is some grammaticalization process involved:lexical values have been diverted to grammatical
values: "will" does not mean lexically synonymous to "want" and "have" not synonymous to  "possess".
 
maybe a way out is to say "it is a grammaticalized form encoding aspect". but this still avoids the issue of
temporality: is there a temporal relation involved between the two actions?

yes, the future perfect "is a grammaticalized form encoding temporality". used after action A in future time,
action B is PRIOR to action A.

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conclusions
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conclusion 1: english "tenses" are nothing but grammaticalized forms; only one or two of these "tenses" (e.g.
simple future) are real tenses, satisfying or approximating rolf's definition of "tense". still, we call them tenses, because we really think of "grammaticalized forms" (a much looser concept) in practice.

conclusion 2: verb forms have to be analyzed in pairs. actions A and B are, so to speak, bonded, in the sense
that the future perfect requires a previous (implicit or explicit) verb form which grammaticalizes future.

challenge: find the BH analogue.

nir cohen