Momentary-Durative

[Vidhyanath Rao]

petegray <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

> [Earlier, in the Vedic hymns,] The aorist can even
> be used where a present would be expected.

I suspect that augmented aorist was preferred for performatives. Another
thing which seems to occur a few times is that augmented aorist being used
for future perfect (where, in English, simple present can be used). [A
similar case occurs in Pali, where both pluperfect and future perfect are
expressed the same way.] But, an aorist for action in progress?
[Injunctives, being tenseless, do not count.]

> In the later language the perfect is simply a preterit or past tense
> equivalent with the imperfect and
> fully interchangeable, and sometimes co-ordinated with it.   Different
> authors appear to prefer different tenses.

This pays no attention to difference in genres and influence of Prakrit
syntax, as I pointed our earlier and which others have: for example Speyer,
``Sanskrit Syntax''.

> Older grammars (e.g. Whitney), modern grammars by Indian linguists (e.g.
> Misra) and modern lingistics books (e.g. Hewson & Bubenik "Tense and
> aspect in IE") all say the same kind of thing.

Unfortunately people sometimes just repeat what they have been told.

Incidentally, I would like to know what the list members think of Hewson and
Bubenik. I find the chapter on Sanskrit confused. Tables repeatedly list
`akarot' and `agacchat' as imperfective, but once admitting that it is the
regular tense of narration and is not really imperfective.

>> I don't see any parts of Sans lit in which aorist has resultative
>> meaning.

> An example from the RV (sorry I don't have the exact reference):
>   putrasya na:ma grhanti praja:m eva anu sam atanat.

> "He gives the son's name; and thus _he has extended_ his race."

There is no such sentence in RV. (it doesn't scan!) Perhaps you are thinking
of Maitra:yan.i Sam.hita (somewhere in bk 1) ``putrasya na:ma gr.hn.a:ti;
praja:m eva:nu sam atani:t''.

Let me first define what a resultative is to me: It is a form that conveys
that the result of the action indicated by the verb obtains at the time of
reference, irrespective of whether the action is recent or not, or if it can
be repeated or not, etc.

The trouble is that the differences between ``hot news'' forms and
resultatives (of recent events) are purely subjective and are not ameable to
derivation by decoding (that is the so-called scientific approach that
denying the understanding of native speakers a la Whitney). It is not easy
to come up with an example of hot news situation for which resultative is
out of the question. Only eamples I can come up with are momentary
light/noise production: for example, to say that ``the bell has rung'', I
can only say ``man.i at.t.ittu vi.t.tatu''. ``.. irukkiratu'' would be
interpreted with an inferential sense (due to a rule that if resultative and
experiential senses are ruled out, then present of iru- will be given an
inferential
meaning) [resultative sense is absent here because when I start talking, the
bell is not audible.] It is not surprising that such examples are hard to
come by in extant Vedic texts.

Even worse, in modern Western European languages, resultatives and passives
cannot be readily distinguished, and perfect and resultatives are also
similar. Thus we take ``John has eaten dinner'' to be resultative, but
``John has eaten ostrich meat'' as experiential perfect. ``The door is
closed'' can be resultative or passive, while ``The door is closed by John''
is passive; the resultative has be expressed as ``The door is closed because
of John'' or some such. We should not attribute labels to the constructions
of another language based on how we translate into the more familiar
languages. [I mention passives here because the question of possible passive
origin of ergatives discussed in a different thread.]  If we use
translations, we must use a language in which the distinction is obligatory.
So I would ask, for example, how to translate the above into Tamil:  Is it
``makanin peyaray upayokikra:n; (atana:l) kutumpat tod.arai ni:t.t.i
vid.ukira:n'' or ``... ni:t.t.iy iruppavana:y a:kira:n''? [But this seems to
disappear in post-Vedic times. It certainly cannot be made morphologically
in Pali or medieval Sanskrit.]  In Vedic the ta-adjective is resultative. It
is not clear that it is interchangeable with the aorist. This is often
claimed, but the evidence comes from much later form of Sanskrit and is not
applicable to Vedic. So the best we can say is that the evidence is murky.
But there are examples where the resultative sense is questionable if not
absent: Where aorist is used with jyok as in RV 10.124.1 ``jyog eva
di:rgham. tama
a:s'ayis.t.ha:h.'', or na + aorist, which denies occurance at any point in
time (``never have ...'') rather than just denying that the result obtains.

> I happily grant that there might be distinctions;  but if there are, they
> are subtle, and not present in all cases.    This does not weaken my
> argument that Sanskrit and Greek do not agree in the meaning and the
> function of these tenses, even if they do agree on the formation.

I agree with the second sentence and the first part of the first sentence.
But to check if a difference is present, we must look at the examples the
difference is palpable and not at the examples where pragmatics makes it
hard to decide. After all, we design experiments to remove the influence of
confounding variables. And the lack of agreement between different languages
should not stop us from looking for possbile common starting point(s) from
which the different systems may have evolved. Studies of grammaticization
that cover a wide spectrum (both areally and genetically) that are becoming
more popular should help here.