This is most interesting, Mari, and I am enjoying our discussions more and
more (at this rate I should be ecstatic when I get to read your papers. To
the crows with snail mail!!) while steadily increasing in my admiration for
your work. I won't repeat the issue of the augment again here. My
impression of what you say about Dahl's survey strikes me as being too
general to establish your case for the present and aorist, though (you knew
I would find something to gripe about), so I thought I would ask you about
a few particulars. When you note the absence of a marked present tense in
the survey, have you considered the relationship between presents and 2nd
aorists in Greek? This is another sore spot in grammatical jargon, but it
appears to me that the major differences in stem that we often find are
actually different words associated respectively with the past and present.
Probably most of these words occur in Homer before the augment appears
historically. We also see less radical but still significant stem changes,
where one can see an morphemic similarity between the two stems. I assume
that when you say none of the 60+ languages marked the present tense verb
alone, you are referring to suffixes. Aren't stem changes just as
significant (or perhaps more so)? You can still argue that aspect is the
question rather than tense, but can you really say that the present is
always unmarked?
Also, as to the so-called historical present, the great majority of
presents in this category have no term within the structure of a given
sentence that marks the statement as past time, e.g. no "yesterday" as in
the example above. Instead, the inference that the event was past usually
comes from an earlier statement using ordinary past-time verbs (in both
Greek and English), and the conventional argument (which makes sense to me)
is that a kind of suspension of reality occurs in which the speaker
suddenly transports her/himself and the listener back into the past by a
mental time machine, due to excitement over the event. Therefore, while we
know that historically the event is past, the temporal statements made have
the same meanings that they normally would have. I could also offer
indirect statement as an illustration of the mental conversion we make. We
may begin with "S/he said that" and use the tenses of the original
statement or convert them one step into the past (Greek is fussy about
keeping the original "tenses", English about converting to past, but
nowadays one can keep the original tenses in Eng. without even being
charged with a misdemeanor). I like to make a very strong distinction
between what the syntactical and lexical elements of a statement actually
mean by the "rules", and how they are interpreted by the listener/reader.
What do you think?
Don Wilkins
UC Riverside