On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 4:46 PM, s.a.breyer <s.a.breyer AT gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Rolf:
>
> My faith in the admirable clarity and rigor of your analysis is
> profoundly shaken by this:
>
> > It is a fundamental linguistic truth that verbs used in narratives
> have past reference.
>
> On what basis do you make this assertion? It seems to me neither
> self-evident nor borne out by linguistic fact, teste folktale and joke
> on the one hand, and the practice of many eminent writers of fiction on
> the other.
>
> Stoney Breyer
> Writer / Touchwood Creative
>
> In Biblical Hebrew, where almost all the narratives are history, i.e. past.
I don’t think he means modern authors, nor folklore.