What I find difficult about this view is that if aspect and tense are so inextricably bound up can there be a language (say Hebrew for e.g.) that was completely aspectual?

Jared

Bella writes, “in extended functions [of deixis] the traditional notions of proximity and distance are interpreted as metaphorical mappings from the physical to the conceptual domain” (40). Using relevance and distance, and both standard and extended uses of deictic elements, Bella discusses deictic tense in Modern Greek (40).
With examples from natural speech, she argues that present tense encodes prominence because the content is considered salient between speaker and audience. She examines situations such as one in which her co-worker used present tense to tell her about a man she liked, but past tense to explain who the same man was to another co-worker. The “proximal” present brings the subject toward deictic centre because it is shared information between the speaker and Bella. She used past tense to encode distant, less relevant information to the second co-worker because the content was not salient to their relationship.
In another case, which I found to be prominent in English as well, Bella describes how the past tense is used to distance information, thus communicating politeness in a sensitive context. A student visits a professor’s office during non-office hours, the student addresses the professor in this way: “I wanted to see you for a bit. Do you have a minute now?” The speaker distanced herself from an action that could be viewed as peremptory. If the student construes her request in the past, then it is perceived as less urgent, and thus distant from her demand for the professor’s time.
Past tense signals distance in other ways too. It has a detaching aspect as well, where the vantage point is from the participants’ point of view. It implies that “the people other than the speaker who at a certain place (there) and a certain time (then) were participants in the event” (45). In Bella’s analysis, deictic tense and the shift in focus between distance and relevance, shows a cognitive pragmatic system that works for both standard uses (now, then, here, there) and extended uses (past and present tense) of deixis in Greek.
She claims that tenses carry pragmatic nuances, such as attitude, evaluation, and point of view. Conceptually, present tense encodes absence of distance and presence of relevance, while past tense points to the opposite. A study of how tense communicates distance and point of view may be a worthwhile and interesting pursuit. In light of Levinson (2003), Bella’s tenses in Modern Greek may fit into his conceptual frames of reference, with present tense as a viewer-centered frame, and past as object (or participant)-centered.

On contrastive substitution, I am taking his written work to be representative of his view on the matter. His most recent article “Prominence: an overview” goes a long way toward clarifying his understanding of such issues compared to how he frames things in “Verbal Aspect.” He is far less tentative, removing room for questions I previously had. I read that article on Friday, so there was no opportunity to discuss it.

I have proposed a paper in the BGLL section to present these issues. I am in the process of writing a detailed article which will allow for a detailed response and dialogue.

Did these questions come up in preparation of your “Temporal Deixis” volume?

http://evepheso.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/remoteness-tense-in-english-and-greek/