The dental preterite of weak verbs remains one of the most troublesome chapters of Germanic historical-comparative grammar. The morphological provenience of its dental formative -d- has been debated for nearly two centuries, and there is still no consensus on whether it is a reflex of one or more of the Indo-European dental suffixes, a grammaticalized form of the light verb d¯o ‘do’, or some mix of these. The category’s phonological development within early Germanic presents a whole series of other (...) mysteries. Why does the effect of syllable weight on umlaut in preterite stems differ in North and West Germanic, and for that matter why should umlaut be sensitive to syllable weight at all? Why does the dental preterite seem to undergo two distinct “phases” of umlaut in North Germanic, and why does this category alone undergo a special early phase of syncope in West Germanic? (shrink)

The Aramaic of the Bible and Qumran, unlike Imperial Aramaic, possesses a unique prefix conjugation that functions as a narrative tense. Aramaists have appealed to various notions of tense, aspect, text-linguistics, and even Hebrew and Akkadian influence to solve the conundrum of the so-called preterite prefix conjugation. A novel proposal is offered here, based on the semantic category of modality. By beginning with future functions of the prefix conjugation and working backward through the present temporal sphere to occurrences in (...) the past, it is argued that modality accounts for the full range of the prefix conjugation’s syntactic functions, even those in independent narrative clauses. Thus, a unified theory of the form’s semantics emerges. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the four elements—universal sinfulness, natural sinfulness, inherited sinfulness, and Adamic sinfulness—of the doctrine of original sin in both the Reformed confessions, with particular attention to the Canons of Dort, and the Council of Trent’s definitive teaching on Original Sin. I give particular attention to the question regarding how all men are implicated in the sin of Adam. Realism and federalism will be analyzed as answers to this question. Even if a theological account is given that (...) justifies the claim that God may justly impute Adam’s sin to his posterity, that still leaves unanswered the question of unconditional negative reprobation, also called, preterition (praeteritio), namely, that God passes over some and not others. Does preterition jeopardize the Church’s call to evangelization? That question will need to be reconsidered briefly, and in conclusion, in light of the doctrine of divine election and its implications for the preaching and hence proclamation of the gospel. (shrink)

We offer a formal account of the English past tenses. We see the perfect as having reference time at speech time and the preterite as having reference time at event time. We formalize four constraints on reference time, which we bundle together under the term ‘perspective’. Once these constraints are satisfied at the different reference times of the perfect and preterite, the contrasting functions of these tenses are explained. Thus we can account formally for the ‘definiteness effect’ and (...) the ‘lifetime effect’ of the perfect, for the fact that the perfect seems to ‘explain’ something about the present, and that the perfect cannot presuppose a past time point. We explain why perfect and preterite can sometimes be interchangeable, and we offer a solution to the ’present perfect puzzle’. We explain the unacceptability of notorious examples of the perfect such as * Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing . We give greater definition to the familiar notions of ‘current relevance’ and ‘extended now’. (shrink)

La Divine Comédie est le récit poétique d'une vision, d'une expérience surnaturelle qui se fait toujours plus intense, et que le langage peine toujours davantage à traduire. La mission de Dante consiste à rapporter cette vision. La question que nous pose la Divine Comédie réside dans la différence entre l'intraduisible et l'indicible: y a-t-il un intraduisible dicible? Ou en d'autres termes : quelle est, au-delà du topos de l'indicible poétique, et au-delà de la figure rhétorique de la prétérition, la signification (...) conceptuelle de l'expression du "dire" dans la Divine Comédie? (shrink)

In some languages, such as French and Austrian German, the perfect construction is the standard tense/aspect form used to report past-time events. In many other languages, including English, the perfect construction alternates with other past tense forms, such as the preterit past (English) or the imperfect (French and many other languages), and there is considerable crosslinguistic variation on the precise usage conditions and semantics associated with each type of past tense form. Many of these languages exhibit the have/be alternation in (...) the formation of the perfect, using have with transitive and unergative verbs, and be with unaccusative verbs. Many other languages, including English, use have uniformly. In this article I will seek to identify the syntactic source of the past tense meaning associated with the perfect construction. Because of the problem posed by the cross-linguistic variation in perfect semantics mentioned above, it is perhaps foolhardy to seek a single answer to this question for all languages, and a comprehensive treatment would require a dissertationlength study. For this reason I will focus on the English perfect construction, though I will occasionally rely on comparative evidence, especially with regard to the have/be alternation, and I will suggest the possibility of parametric variation. Even by focusing on the English perfect, we cannot fully avoid the problem of semantic variation, since the perfect construction does not have a uniform semantics in all its uses; according to many accounts, there are at least two, and perhaps as many as five, different uses of the perfect, each with a different tense semantics. For example, Brugger and D’Angelo (1994) have argued that the so-called universal perfect does not convey past tense; this claim is based on a particular set of syntactic/semantic diagnostics for past that they use, and is supported by the fact that many other languages convey the semantics of the universal perfect by means of the present tense.. (shrink)

The Wallflower Avant-Garde highlights a strain of formalism visible in both modernist literature and contemporary queer studies, drawing attention to an aesthetic that is as quiet and quirky as it is queer. In studies of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery, Brian Glavey argues for a recalibrated understanding of the relation between sexuality and the aesthetic, revealing a non-oppositional avant-gardism that opts out of some of the binaristic imperatives that have structured recent debates in (...) queer theory. Refusing to decide between positive and negative affects or to side with either utopian or antisocial ambitions, The Wallflower Avant-Garde explores models of reading and writing about art that remain flexible enough to dig deep even as they gloss the surface.At the heart of this argument is a revaluation of modernist ekphrasis, a mode understood as literature's imitation or description of the visual arts. From the well-wrought urns of the New Critics onward, ekphrasis has figured prominently in the legacy of modernist literary criticism, but a tendency to read its complicated modes of relationality in terms of either autonomy or antagonism has obscured the forms of creative failure and imitation embodied in the desire to confuse poetry for pottery. Attending to mimetic and descriptive strategies without dismissing the aspirations for wholeness and closure that often animate them allows for the recognition that queerness and modernism are intertwined in unexpected and unpredictable ways, revealing new insights into the varieties of abstraction, preterition, and spatial form that stand behind modernism's investment in the aesthetic. (shrink)

Proportional quantification and progressive aspect interact in English in revealing ways. This paper investigates these interactions and draws conclusions about the semantics of the progressive and telicity. In the scope of the progressive, the proportion named by a proportionality quantifier (e.g. most in The software was detecting most errors) must hold in every subevent of the event so described, indicating that a predicate in the scope of the progressive is interpreted as an internally homogeneous activity. Such an activity interpretation is (...) argued to be available for telic predicates (e.g. cross the street) because these receive a partitive interpretation except in combination with a completive operator, which asserts that the event so described has culminated. The obligatoriness of the completive operator in the preterit is shown to parametrically distinguish those languages that show completion entailments in the preterit, e.g. English, from those that do not, e.g. Malagasy, Hindi, and Japanese. (shrink)