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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
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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

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References

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