1 Future and Conditional Structures in Greek and English Parallel Texts Kleoniki Binga Supervisor Dr. Tsangalidis Anastasios Aristotle University of Thessaloniki March 2019 FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL STRUCTURES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXTS Abstract This essay seeks to explore the ways in which the English and the Modern Greek language correspond to each other in terms of three basic items of focus, those of tense, aspect and conditionality. The first part seeks to examine and exemplify the similarities and differences that these two languages share regarding the terms of tense and aspect by the use of various linguistic theories and literary examples. This clarification is important in order to move to the second part which focuses on a different item, that of conditionality. In this part of the essay, various conditionality types of the English and the Modern Greek language are presented and are thoroughly analyzed in order to move to more complex conditional structures dealing with semantic differences. Another part of both languages which is highly examined is the ways in which the Greek particle θα corresponds to the English particle would. Thus, I presented the ways in which they behave by the use of literary examples and observed their different forms and characteristics. FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL STRUCTURES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXTS 3 This chapter seeks to explore and exemplify the different types of tenses and the connotations they carry, as well as, the particularities of some particles such as θα across the English and Modern Greek languages. In order to present and analyze them we are going to provide some linguistic theories and examples taken from Tolkien‟s (1954) literary work Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. This exploration takes place in order to understand the complexity of these languages regarding their tense and aspect forms in order to realize in the second part of this paper the degree of complexity that these structures may cause when combined with other semantic and pragmatic linguistic properties. In order to achieve moving to deeper analysis and efficiently exemplify such grammatical structures the terminology of the words “tense” and “aspect” should be clarified. Tense and aspect, according to Dahl and Vellupilai (2013) are dealt with as grammatical categories of verbs. A grammatical category is “a class of units (such as noun and verb) or features (such as number and case) that share a common set of characteristics” (WALS online). It is quite difficult for linguists to determine what the exact meaning of both terms is; consequently many definitions and linguistic opinions are going to be presented in order to conclude to the most accurate possible illustration of their meaning. Comrie (1985) attempts to define tense as the “grammaticalisation of location in time” and aspect as the “grammaticalisation of expression of internal temporal constituency” (of events, processes etc)” (p. 7). According to Dahl and Vellupilai, grammaticalisation is a “synchronic property characterizing a notion (semantic category) if and only if it is reflected in or determines the use of grammatical items.” (cite από WALS online). Miller (2002), also, elaborates on the difference that lies in the meaning of the terms tense and aspect in his work Syntax in Discourse: Aspect, FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL STRUCTURES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXTS 4 Tense, Voice by stating that “aspect allows speakers and writers to present events as completed or as stretched out over time, as single occurrences or as repeated and habitual” while “tense allows events to be located in past, present or future time and to be located relative to other events” (p. 158). Further analysis takes place in Saeed‟s (2008) work Sentence Semanics 1: Situation where he attempts to define tense by asserting that languages have grammatical forms, such as verb endings, which allow the speaker to locate a situation in time relative to the “now” of the act of speaking or writing. This marking of time is what Saaed calls tense (p.114). Aspect, on the other hand is, also, a grammatical system related to time, but here the speaker has the opportunity to choose how to describe the internal temporal nature of a situation. To exemplify this, it depends on the aspect whether the speaker is going to portray the action as completed in the past or as an ongoing process that is not yet finished (Saaed, 2008, p. 114). Aspect according to Saaed (2008) “allows the speaker to view an event as complete, or incomplete, as so short as to involve almost no time, as something stretched over a perceptible period, or as something repeated over a period” (p. 125). The last definition that I am going to use to interpret the meaning of the terms tense and aspect is based on Rodney Huddleston‟s and Geoffrey K. Pullum‟s (2005) literary work named A Student’s Introduction to the English Grammar in which they argue that the aspect is, indeed, “the grammatical form that is used to indicate how the speaker views a situation in a clause with respect not to its location in time but to its temporal structure or properties” meaning that “a situation can be either complete or in progress” (p. 51). THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE After attempting to decipher the general meaning of “tense” and “aspect” we are going to move to a deeper analysis focusing on the English language. Miller (2002) FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL STRUCTURES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXTS 5 refers to the English language as one that includes three tenses, the present, the future and the past. He refers to the structure of the present and past tense being formed by the use of suffixes –s and –ed accordingly. Future is formed by the use of the auxiliary verbs shall and will followed by the verb and is, thus, considered a syntactic construction rather than a simple word (Miller, 2002). There are, also, theories like the one found in Huddleston and Pullum‟s (2005) literary work, A Student’s Introduction to the English Grammar, that deny the existence of a future tense in English, though we can refer to it by using the modal auxiliary will, which is found to be more connected to mood and aspect rather than tense itself (p. 56). Another syntactic structure that is central for the English language is the Present Perfect. It is not easy to classify the Present Perfect as a tense or an aspect since it is constituted by have or has (ejo) and a past participle. The past participle connotes a completed action and therefore the Perfect looks like an aspectual element (Miller, 2002, p. 162).On the other hand, has indicates the present and this is what makes the Present Perfect complicated. In order not to procrastinate further on this issue, Miller (2002) states that the Perfect tends to “focus on the presently accessible consequences of a past event rather than the past itself per se” (p. 162). Saaed (2008) agrees with Miller on the English language usually being marked by grammatical endings, as well as, with the use of some auxiliary verbs such as will when the speaker desires to make the time of the action clear. Moreover, he, also, assents with Miller (2002) that the English language has three tenses, those of Present, Past and Future but in his research he, also, refers to the more complex tenses such as the past perfect or pluperfect (Saaed, 2008, p. 123-124). FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL STRUCTURES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXTS 6 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: ASPECT Moving to the second subject of focus, concerning Dahl‟s(1985) worldwide system containing 42 out of 65 languages, the most common aspectual distinction between languages is the perfective/ imperfective one (Saaed, 2008,p. 132). Comrie (1976) in his work Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems refers to perfectivity as observing a situation as an outside viewer while imperfectivity regards a situation where the speaker describes the event‟s internal stages from within (p. 16). This definition is compatible with Saaed‟s (2008) theories on progressive and simple aspectual structures (p. 131). When an action is described as an ongoing event that has duration in the past, present or future, Saaed (2008) characterizes it as progressive. The progressive is usually marked with an –ing ending and is used in dynamic situations (p. 126): eg. 1) When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. Όηαλ ν θύξηνο Μπίικπν Μπάγθηλο ηνπ Μπαγθ Δλη αλαθνίλσζε όηη ζε ιίγν θαηξό ζα γηόξηαδε ηα εθαηόλ έληεθα ρξόληα ηνπ θαη ζα „δηλε έλα πάξηη κε εμαηξεηηθή κεγαινπξέπεηα, όινη ειεθηξίζηεθαλ ζην Υόκπηηνλ θαη άξρηζαλ ην θνπηζνκπνιηό (Tolkien, 1954) On the other hand, the perfect aspect allows the speaker to underline the relevance of a past action to the present and focuses on the consequences of this particular past event to the time of speaking or a time he/she chooses in the past or future (Saaed, 2008, p. 127). The last aspect that Saaed (2008) analyzes is the simple one which FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL STRUCTURES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXTS 7 involves both aspects since it depends on the context and the components of each sentence (p. 128). Moreover, Miller (2002) in his literary work Syntax in Discourse: Aspect, Tense, Voice states that there are two types of aspects; the first one being the lexical, meaning the different lexical classes of verbs or situation type verbs, and the second being the grammatical one which refers to the “information encoded in the grammars of languages (p.