Stephen Carlson wrote:I've recently come to the conclusion that we should avoid the term "aspect-only"-- and I’ve been guilty of that myself. Nobody is truly “aspect-only” because everyone recognizes that the difference between the present and imperfect is not aspectual but based on some other feature, whether the traditional tense, the newer remoteness, or something else. In fact, Porter avoids tense in his verbal system by positing +expectation for the future and +remoteness for the imperfect. So instead of an aspect-tense system, Porter has an aspect-expectation-remoteness system.
Time for a shave!
Stephen, I sympathize with an attempt for more precision. But replacing 'tense' with 'expectation' and 'remoteness' basically means adding two poorly conceived and poorly defined 'zero' terms into a description that is supposed to summarize an idea and to get someone into the general semantic domain where discussions are taking place. 'tense' is much better for this.
So I would be happy with expanding a description of a Porterite system as "aspect only--without tense". That gets the gist across accurately, although someone may object that Porterites sometimes use the term "tense" to refer to a formal category even though those categories are then defined as being without time-referencing tense. The redefinition of 'tense' is their problem, not the rest of the field.
For over 2000 years and including the present era, time has been seen by users of Greek as included in the indicative verbs. Stating a temporal perspective clearly is what Rijksbaron did and the whole point of annoting Rijksbaron is to start with a write-up that is basically pointed in the right direction. Deviancies can be footnoted, fine, but the problem with so many of these discussions is that the 'muddledness of remoteness' ends up the point of discussion rather than the clarity of tense.