Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?)

[Vidhyanath Rao]

"petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote
> >. According to Bybee et
> > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked
> > > present is unknown in extant languages.

To be precise, I should have said zero past vs non-zero present. Cases
where both past and present carry special markings (equipollent
oppositions) are fairly common.

> This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable!   Classical
> Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and
> commonest tense meaning is the past.   I believe Arabic, both
> classical and modern, has a similar structure.

Arabic has a perfective vs imperfective opposition. That the perfective
is most often translated by English past is irrelevant.

The difference is that when a language has a perfective vs imperfective
contrast (but without explicitely marked tense) , the latter is used
amid a narratives in perfectives to denote incomplete or background
events and to denote habituals including past habituals. A present (or
non-past) is not used that way, but depends purely on the time of the
event. Defining tense and aspect this way (which goes back to Comrie,
though Bybee et al prefer the slightly modified version of Dahl), zero
perfective is not uncommon, zero imperfective is seems to be less common
(though, through the accidents history, are more familar), both poles
non-zero is widespread, but zero past is unknown.