Tense & Aspect

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Peter &/or Graham" <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

>Miguel said:

>>The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the
>>three forms.  Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three
>>*forms*.

>The logic of this is open to dispute.   A language may have more than one
>way of saying something without also having a formal distinction of meaning
>between the various "forms".

Accepted.  I might object that such a stage is always transitory
(different meanings have merged, new distinct meanings will
develop, or distinct forms will disappear), but then everything
is transitory in language.

>Furthermore, the distinction in Greek is classical.  In Homer the
>differences are much less clear.   Palmer (speaking of Homer) says "The
>imperfect and the aorist are indistinguishable in function"  and he gives
>examples where aorist and imperfect are used in the same place in a phrase,
>sometimes in the same line, sometimes within two or three lines of each
>other, without any distinction of meaning.   He also quotes a couple of
>places in Homer where the aorist is "almost indistinguishable from the
>perfect".   He points to Iliad 14:178ff where he calls the alternation of
>tenses "bewildering".

Interesting.  Of course, the fact that the Iliad is poetry does
play a part (if an impf. doesn't fit the metre, maybe an aorist
does?).

>Even in classical Greek prose there are surprises.   Plato (Phaedo) uses an
>imperfect to say "we caught sight of ..."   How can that in any sense be
>continuative?   (The usual explanation is that it is "infective" - that is
>to say, it shows the beginning of the action.)    There are also cases where
>the aorist indicative is used timelessly (as are the other non-indicative
>forms).   This can point to a distinction not of aspect but of time marked
>and non-time marked.

>That may or may not be true, but my point is that the distinction of
>imperfect / aorist / perfect, which is often so tidy and pleasing in the
>books, is occasionally much muddier in the reality of actual usage.   This
>might in turn indicate that it is a late development - hence its restricted
>occurrence in IE languages.

It's interesting to compare the situation in Spanish Spanish,
which also has three past tenses (imperfect: <andaba>, "aorist"
(preterit): <anduve>, (periphrastic) perfect: <he andado>
[there's also the pluperfect <habi'a andado>]).  In Spanish
America, the periphrastic perfect (used for past action within
the same time frame as when the speaking is done, implicitly
"today", explicitly "this year" or "this century", for instance),
has been abandoned in favour of the preterit.  Spain: "la he
visto" (I saw her [today]), "la vi" (I saw her [not today]) ==
Argentina: "la vi".

In Portuguese, surprisingly, the periphrastic perfect (ter + vb.)
denotes a kind of past iterative ("a repetic,a~o de um acto ou a
sua continuidade ate' o presente em que falamos", Cunha/Cintra
"Breve gram'atica do portugue^s contemporaneo").

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam