From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 19 1998 - 08:17:42 EST
At 7:35 PM -0600 1/18/98, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>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.
Is that what the traditional approach really does point to? I would have
thought it is traditional to understand the present, aorist, and perfect
stems to grammaticalize aspect, but I'd be leery of going beyond that.
>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.
So far, so good. It's worth noting that Hebrew has only two
"tenses"--perfect and imperfect, and that the imperfect is normally used to
express the future.
>In Greek, the future active uses the present stem, but the present passive
>uses the aorist stem.
Was this a slip? It seems to me that both these clauses are mis-statements
as they stand--or oversimplifications. (a) While it is true that the bulk
of (ancient) Greek futures involve modification of the present stem, there
are numerous future stems that aren't based at all upon the present stem,
e.g.:
MANQANW/MAQHSOMAI
PASCW/PEISOMAI
LAMBANW/LHYOMAI
BAINW/BHSOMAI . . .
(b) I think you probably meant in the second clause above, "the FUTURE
passive uses the AORIST PASSIVE stem." Actually I'd be all the more careful
talking about the passive (I'd start out saying that the present passive is
a special usage of the present middle/reflexive and that the future passive
and aorist passive are both special usages of a distinctive type of 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'd question generalizations of this sort based upon tense forms that are
compounded of participles and auxiliaries. As I've shown above, the ANCIENT
Greek future cannot that simply be said to be built upon the present stem,
while the MODERN GREEK future has two forms, one of them imperfective, the
other aoristic, and both of them are actually periphrastic subjunctives of
present and aorist tenses respectively.
>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?
My initial reaction to any kind of reductionist theory is to be skeptical
and wary of simplistic explanations of what are probably more complex
phenomena. What I want to see is where the exceptions are and how they will
be dealt with in the explanation. I guess this is more an exploration of a
notion than a "theory." Nevertheless, I'd offer a couple cautions here: (1)
I think it may be a mistake to bring VOICE into the discussion of aspect
morphology--at least at the outset; (2) I rather suspect that the future
may be a hybrid development in IE languages; I really don't think it exists
in Proto-Indo-European.
I do think that the English present tense is much more complex in its
varied usages than most of us who speak English, even if we use them
correctly (if we do?) are reflectively conscious of.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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