The Zero Tense in Greek A Critical Note -- By: Stephen M. Reynolds

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 32:1 (Nov 1969)
Article: The Zero Tense in Greek A Critical Note
Author: Stephen M. Reynolds


The Zero Tense in Greek
A Critical Note

Stephen M. Reynolds

Karl Theodor Rodemeyer in a study of Herodotus and Thucydides1 advanced the proposition that the historical present in these writers indicates that an event took place at the same time as, or immediately after, a point of time already given.

Slight attention has been paid to Rodemeyer’s work by grammarians of New Testament Greek, and the impression has remained with most New Testament scholars that the historical present in the Greek text is used for vividness and dramatic effect.

Paul Kiparsky has recently written an article, “Tense and Mood in Indo-European Syntax,” in which he maintains that it is a characteristic of early forms of Indo-European languages, including Greek, to reduce the past tense to a zero tense in continuous narrative, after establishing that the event occurred in the past. He writes, “Schematically the sequence… Past… and… Past…is reduced to…Past…zero…, and since it is the present which is the zero tense, the reduced structure… Past and…zero…is realized morphologically as…Past… and Present….”2

Although some modern languages such as Icelandic and perhaps Albanian have retained this reduction, Kiparsky says: “In general, however, conjunction of past and historical present is quite untypical of modern languages. Conversely, the sustained use of the historical present in long passages of narrative which is natural in these, is conspicuously absent in earlier Indo-European. In this respect the two systems are completely reversed.”3

In discussing the properties of the present tense in a past situation in classical Greek, Kiparsky writes of “the impossibility of adequately characterizing the so-called historical present on a semantic basis

alone. Rather, a syntactic solution is called for. It is beginning to look as if the historical present in early Indo-European is a present tense only in its superficial form. It functions syntactically as a past tense, as shown by sequence of tenses, it is semantically indistinguishable from the past tenses, and it alternates with these in conjoined structures.

“Everything points to its being an underlying past tense, and its conversion into the present tense in the surface structure must be governed by a syntactic rule, evidently some form of conjunction reduction, which optionally reduces repeated occurrences of the same tense to the present. Such a rule not only accounts for the historical present, but...

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