On condition …: aspect and modality in the history of Greek

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Horrocks
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
History Of

It is a commonplace of textbook treatments of mood and modality to point out that many languages employ ‘past tense’ forms to express not only temporal but also modal remoteness (i.e. unreality or potentiality) from the ‘here-and-now’, e.g. Lyons (1977: 809–23), Palmer (1986: 208–15). The same observation, mutatis mutandis, may apply to certain modal forms, which, given an appropriate context, can also refer to the past. The verb forms in English conditional sentences such as that in (1):(1) If Mary went to the bar, she would drink too much.provide an excellent example of both types of ‘extended’ usage; cf. the two possible readings of (1) given in (2):(2)(a) If (ever) Mary went to the bar, she used to drink too much.(b) If Mary were (ever) to go to the bar, she would drink too much.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Compound Verbs ◽  
Finite Verb

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  

scholarly journals “The Trout Breaks the Ice” by Mikhail Kuzmin: Verse and Grammar

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Marina Akimova
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Complex Composition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Compositional Structure ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Astronomical Time ◽  
Mikhail Kuzmin ◽  
Iambic Pentameter ◽  
Finite Verb

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.

scholarly journals The Golok Dialect and Written Tibetan past-tense verb forms

1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Sprigg
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Present Tense

Tibetan orthography looks phonetically challenging, to say the least; and one may well wonder whether such tongue-twisting combinations as the brj of brjes, the blt- of bltas, or the bst- of bstan ever did twist a Tibetan tongue, or whether the significance of these and other such orthographic forms might not have been morphophonemic in origin, with the letters r, l, and s in the syllable initial of forms such as these serving to associate these past-tense forms lexically with their corresponding present-tense forms; e.g. Viewed in relation to Tibetan orthography the past-tense forms of a class of verbs in the Golok dialect seem to support this hypothesis. Table 1, below, contains a number of examples of Golok verbs in their past-tense and present-tense forms to illustrate a type of phonological analysis suited to that view of the r syllable-initial unit in the Golok examples, and, indirectly, in the WT examples too (the symbols b and b will be accounted for in section (B) below).

Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead Matter

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-590
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fay
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
James Boswell ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
Prometheus Unbound ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
New Time

I tell every body it [the Life] will be an Egyptian Pyramid in which there will be a compleat mummy of Johnson that Literary Monarch.—James Boswell (qtd. in Wendorf 105)Michel de Certeau thinks about reading as an archaic practice: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else … despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). Embedded in Certeau's romanticization of reading is a history of how Egypt has been read: as wealth to be plundered, as endlessly available texts, as the ruin of time. Pose against this lostness Friedrich Nietzsche's contention that all philosophy is just Egyptianism, the nostalgia for and reification of a past tense without a dynamic sense of history, so many “conceptual mummies” (35). Nietzsche reminds us to consider not lost origins but the possibility of endings, not the loss of history but its death—not death in the sense of apocalypse as Percy Bysshe Shelley's “now” and the release of new time in Prometheus Unbound but death as the archaic, the ruin, the mute, as Egypt's lost “now” and the end stop of archaic time. I will pursue the problems of the archaic, poetic ground, and translative readings Romantically through Hegel's Egyptianized account of aesthetic practices, for Nietzsche's post-Romantic Egyptianism mummifies thought. Although Hegel's Egyptianizing also concerns the dead matter of the past, his account renders that matter as dynamic. His revivification of the archaic Romantically accounts for its contaminative potential as a mysterious text whose translation can unearth a curse, and/or a promise, for the new.

scholarly journals Verb Form and Tense in Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Yasir Alotaibi
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
Neutral Context ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
English Verb ◽  
Modern Standard

This paper discusses tense in Arabic based on three varieties of the language: Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the Taif dialect (TD). We argue against previous analyses that suggest that Arabic is a tenseless language, which assume that tense information is derived from the context. We also argue against the suggestion that Arabic is tensed, but that its tense is relative, rather than absolute. We propose here that CA, MSA, and TD have closely related verb forms, and that these are tensed verbs. Tense in Arabic is absolute in a neutral context and verb forms take the perfective and imperfective aspect. Similar to other languages including English, verb forms in Arabic may take reference from the context instead of the present moment. In this case, we argue that this does not mean that tense in Arabic is relative, because this would also imply that tense in many languages, including English, is relative. Further, we argue that the perfective form indicates only the past tense and the imperfective form, only the present; all other interpretations are derived by implicature.

scholarly journals Obligatory Movement Operations for Verbal Roots in Najdi Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Al Qahtani Khulud ◽  
Al Zahrani Mohammad
Keyword(s):  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Najdi Arabic

This paper focuses on the obligatory movement operations that Najdi Arabic (NA) verb forms must undergo to satisfy the morphosyntactic requirements within the minimalist program (MP). Recall that the practice of the MP syntactic theory, including its further advancements, proposed by Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2001) springs from the fact that the grammar of a language starts basically from the lexicon from which suitable words are selected to form clauses. The selected words undergo some syntactic operations such as Merge, by which larger constituents are formed, and Move, by which the formed constituents move to higher positions in the hierarchy to fulfil some specific syntactic purposes. When the elements have undergone the operations of Merge and Move they are spelled out into phonetic forms (PF) and logical forms (LF). In light of this, we argue that NA verbs start out as roots in the head of VP before merging with the vocalic affixes in the head of Tax-AspP to satisfy the subjectverb agreement requirements and mark the aspect features. Perfective verb forms must then continue to move to T to merge with the past tense abstract features while imperfective forms stay in Tax-AspP. The thematic subject is generated in Spec,VP; it may stay there to derive the VSO order, or move higher to derive the SVO order. The findings show that obligatory movements indicate interactions between the functional categories of TP, Tax-AspP and VP: NA verbal roots obligatorily move to Tax-Asp to derive (im)perfective forms; perfectives obligatorily move to T.

In Search of Queer Theology Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sexual Regulation ◽  
Queer Theology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lived Time

In History of Sexuality 1, Foucault tried to represent—as allusion, satire, dream—the difficulty of finding new speech for telling the lives of sexed bodies. On his account, triumphal claims to have liberated both sex and the speech about it do no more than restage existing regimes for sexual regulation. They dress up biopower in bolder colors. Foucault’s effort at analysis should be recalled by anyone trying to write queer theology—much more, to write about it in the past tense. Whatever queer theology has managed to do, it has not yet been able to sustain new forms for speech about bodily pleasures in lived time. One theological writer who exerted herself to write into this difficulty was Marcella Althaus-Reid. This chapter looks in her chief works for telling moments of compositional failure—which are, not coincidentally, the moments of greatest promise. These passages suggest how to write queer theology more intentionally, especially in the direction of the indefensible boundary between theology and what is now called “literature.”

scholarly journals Keening the Dead: Ancient History or a Ritual for Today?

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Mc Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Society Today

In his 1909 work ‘Rites De Passage’, Arnold van Gennep acknowledges that a ritual often contains ‘rites within rites’. So, it was with the ancient ritual of the Irish wake, at the center of which was another ritual, that of the keen, the Irish funeral lament. The past tense is used tentatively here, as in this article the author explores the resilience of the ritual and how, rather than becoming extinct, the keen seems to spend periods of time underground before erupting again in a new form, attuning itself to a more contemporaneous social situation. Drawing on ethnographic and bibliographic research undertaken between 2010 and 2018, the author traces some of the history of the keen within the ritual of the Irish wake and funeral and gives instances of how it is being reconfigured in the 21st century. This continuation of the ritual, albeit in a new format, seems to speak to a deep emotional and spiritual need that may not be satisfied by more conventional religion in Ireland. Finally, the author considers the keen’s relevance and place in Irish society today.

A Japanese child's use of stative and punctual verbs

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary A. Cziko ◽  
Keiko Koda
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Process ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Early Use ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Present Progressive

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language between the ages of 1;0 and 4;11 in an attempt to find evidence for two of Bickerton's (1981) proposed language acquisition universals, which form part of the language bioprogram hypothesis of language acquisition. As predicted by Bickerton's state-process hypothesis, it was found that all sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Also, with only one exception, all omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of ‘mixed’ verbs, i.e. verbs which behave syntactically as process verbs in Japanese but are nonetheless semantically stative. However, contrasting with Bickerton's hypothesis that children initially use the past tense to mark punctuality, no relationship between past tense use and punctuality was found.

scholarly journals PREHISTORIC CHARACTERS ART AND COLOR COMBINATION

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3SE) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Anjali Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Color Combination ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Part Time

The past tense can only be studied through the present. For the study of the past, one can draw conclusions about past events by taking the present objects or present-day memoirs as residuals of the past. The arguments on which conclusions are drawn are based on observation of current things, events and relationships. "1Since time immemorial, humans have been trying to discover the past. With the development of knowledge, humans started searching for evidence related to the knowledge of the past and facts were proved with the appropriate evidence. Historians also have to use various evidence for factual presentation of knowledge related to the past. Archaeological material has become the mainstay of scientific and factual study of the history of the past. The major source of archaeological material is human creativity and artistic expression. Whose utilitarian form comes to us in the form of man-made pottery. Pots are used by historians as part time and society as special. भूत काल का अध्ययन केवल वर्तमान के माध्यम से ही किया जा सकता है। बीते हुए समय के अध्ययन के लिये वर्तमान वस्तुओं अथवा वर्तमान में विद्यमान संस्मरणों को भूतकाल के अवषेषों के रुप में लेकर उनसे भूतकाल की धटनाओं के बारे में निष्कर्ष निकाला जा सकता है। वे तर्क जिनके आधार पर निष्कर्ष निकाले जाते वे वर्तमान वस्तुओं, घटनाओं तथा सम्बन्धों के अवलोकन पर आधारित होते हैं।’’1अनादि काल से मानव अतीत की खोज के लिए प्रयत्नषील रहा है।़ ज्ञान के विकास के साथ मानव ने अतीत के ज्ञान सम्बधीं साक्ष्य खोजने प्रारम्भ किये और उपयुक्त साक्ष्यों से तथ्य प्रमाणित किये जाने लगे। इतिहासकार को भी अतीत सम्बंधी ज्ञान की तथ्यात्मक प्रस्तुति के लिये विभिन्न साक्ष्यों का प्रयोग करना पड़ता है। पुरातात्विक सामग्री अतीत के इतिहास के वैज्ञानिक एवं तथ्यपूर्ण अध्ययन का प्रमुख आधार बन गई है। पुरातात्विक सामग्री का प्रमुख स्त्रोत मानव की सृजनात्मकता और कलात्मक अभिव्यक्ति है। जिसका उपयोगितावादी स्वरुप मानव द्वारा निर्मित मृद्भांड के रुप में हमारे सामने आता है। मृद्भांडों को, इतिहासकार काल विषेष तथा समाज विषेष के रुप में प्रयोग करते हैं।

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