There are always ways of making the time explicit, even the default
forms. FOr an English example, consider the unmarked present with
yesterday and tomorrow:
Yesterday I come home and find Kyrie [real name of daughter #2,
Jonathan) asleep in her crib.
Tomorrow I volunteer in Hanne's school, so I can't make a dentist
appointment for that day.
I give similar Greek examples in my thesis (I think you have a copy,
right Ken). As for 'once', the same holds true--it can be made
explicit (in fact, there is an overt morpheme marking such in
Russian). But I think we have to look elsewhere for the
time/singularity when the forms are not so marked (e.g. aorist,
present).
As for what a writer WOULD do, there are multiple options: tense,
time adverbials, mutually understood context.... It would be
interesting to study what author's DID do on a statistical basis. I
think (know?) we would find most aorists past-referring, and most
presents present-referring. THis statistical majority may be
explained in terms of how perfective and imperfective aspect present
situations, and is a common pattern cross-linguistically
(e.g. Arabic). But, to paraphrase Roman Jakobson, we must take care
not to make the statistical preference the grammatical requirement.
Best,
Mari
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Mari Broman Olsen
Research Associate
University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
3141 A.V. Williams Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658
molsen@umiacs.umd.edu
*********