Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T21:24:31.863Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On condition …: aspect and modality in the history of Greek1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Geoffrey Horrocks
Geoffrey Horrocks
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 41 , 1996 , pp. 153 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chantraine, P. (1963) Grammaire Homérique: Vol. II Syntaxe, Paris.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1994) Review of Thieroff (1994) in Journal of Linguistics 30.1: 298–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, W. W. (1889) Syntax of the moods and tenses of the Greek verb, London.Google Scholar
Lyons, J. (1977) Semantics (2 vols., continuous pagination), Cambridge.Google Scholar
Mackridge, P. (1985) The modern Greek language, Oxford.Google Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1986) Mood and modality, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Ricks, D. (1990) Byzantine heroic poetry, Bristol.Google Scholar
Seaton, R. C. (1889) ‘The iterative use of ἄν with the imperfect and aorist indicative’ in The Classical Review 3: 343–5.Google Scholar
Thieroff, R. (1994) ‘Inherent verb categories and categorizations in European languages’, in Thieroff, R. and Ballweg, J. (eds.), Tense systems in European languages, Tübingen, 3–45.Google Scholar