The aim of the present paper is to investigate the possibility for Western tense theories to be applied successfully to the description of the Georgian tense system. Georgian tense is extremely complex because the Georgian language is agglutinative which means that semantic information which is scattered over the sentence in Germanic and Romance languages is expressed by a morphologically very complex verbal form that has many other duties to fulfill apart from expressing temporal information. It will be argued that the binary tense system as developed in [8] and modernized in [9] is indeed applicable and, after an extension, may even explain in a sufficient degree of depth why Georgian tense is expressed as it is, especially as far as the aorist is concerned. The description of the Georgian tenses—both the analytic ones and the synthetic ones—in terms of binary oppositions seems more adequate than a description in terms of the standard ternary make up of the Reichenbachian framework.
展开▼
