To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: English descriptive grammars and more irrelevances
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 08:31:46 +0100
At 16.35 03/01/00 +0100, Ian Hutchesson wrote:
Referring to:
He said he'd been drinking when the accident happened.
Rolf:
>>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)
I've just reread what's below and it would seem I should have gone to bed
before writing it!
>I have the feeling that such a descriptive system needs to be mildly
>recursive, able to talk of ST1 and we get C1=RT1(=ST2)>ST1 which would be
>the equivalent of "He said," C2=RT2>ST2 (implied by the when-clause) "he'd
>had an accident", C3>RT2>ST2, "he had been drinking."
If we replace "C" with "ET" it would make a hellovalot more sense. The
recursive notion I still feel necessary.
1) ET1=RT1>ST1
(I said) He said...
2) ET2=RT2>ST2=ET1
(He said) when the accident happened...
3) ET3>RT2>ST2
(when the even happened) he had been drinking
If that makes any clearer sense. The reported speech act is event 1.