... This is what all linguists know and ordinary persons understand (but they do not describe it by the help of grammatical terminology): The past reference of some English verbs is sometimes connected with the verb form, in other cases it is dependent on the context. As linguists we must be ready to show why we say that "walked" has an intrinsic past tense while that is not the case with "walking".Rolf, I accept that this is in general true of these examples in English, although even so the tense is not completely uncancellable as I showed a few days ago. I do not accept that that implies that the same is necessarily true of all verb form distinctions in all languages at all stages of their diachronic development. After all, if there is any truth in the theory that Hebrew (and Arabic) changed from an aspectual system to a tense-based one, there must have been at least a short period during which mother tongue speakers were uncertain or had different opinions about whether certain distinctions were ones of tense or aspect. And there is no compelling reason why such a situation might not continue for a long period.
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