From: Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Date: Sun Jan 18 1998 - 20:35:24 EST
I have been thinking about the correlation between the present stem and
imperfective aspect, and coming up with some wild ideas I wanted to run by
y’all. I would like the stem to mean something. It certainly can’t
grammaticalize tense, and until recently I was convinced it could not
grammaticalize aspect either - but I’m beginning to question that last
assumption. The present stem is used for these tenses:
imperfect
present
future
Both imperfect and present have imperfective aspect; future is not usually
thought to be marked for aspect. Thus, the stem does not grammaticalize
tense, since the present stem is used for past reference, present
reference, and future reference. By most accounts, it does not
grammaticalize aspect either. Using the traditional approach, no clear
statement about what it does grammaticalize is possible.
But parallels with other languages have led me to start questioning this.
First, I am less certain that the future is not imperfective. In English,
the most common way of expressing the future is the present progressive:
I am going to the store
The English present progressive is imperfective. In Greek, the present
tense is often used to express the future, and the Greek present is
imperfective. One possibility is that the Greek future has imperfective
aspect, and the present stem grammaticalizes imperfective aspect. By one
common definition, the imperfective force has a view of an event which does
not include the endpoint; this definition may be consistent with the way
that the future is actually used. This might lead to a consistent account
of Greek verb morphology, in which the augment is a marker of past tense,
and the verb stem is a marker of aspect.
In Greek, the future active uses the present stem, but the present passive
uses the aorist stem. Recently, I realized that this parallels other
Indo-European languages, including English and German - I *think* this is
also true for French and Latin, based on the opinions of a few people at a
medical records conference I attended. Consider these forms:
I shot I ate I grew
I had shot I had eaten I had grown
I shoot I eat I grow
I am shooting I am eating I am growing
I will shoot I will eat I will grow
I will be shot I will be eaten I will be grown
In these examples, the future active is morphologically identical to the
present; the future passive is morphologically identical to the perfect,
and morphologically quite distinct from the present. Thus, in English as
well as in Greek, the future passive is morphologically similar to a past
tense form, but the future active is morphologically related to the present
tense.
I assume that there are modern linguists who try to account for morphology,
but I have never read anything that takes a modern approach to morphology.
How do modern linguists treat the morphology of the English future passive?
Where can I find a good basic account of English morphology?
Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com
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