Inclusion of the perfect tense for Ancient Greek and other languages

[jpharper]

In Ancient Greek (and Armenian, Lithuanian etc.) the perfect tense is distinguished morphologically from the simple past (aorist). Both of these are perfective in aspect, but currently UD has no way of distinguishing them. This is a significant oversight as there is a definite semantic distinction. Currently the only tenses available as features of a verb are Past, Pres, Fut, Imp, and Pqp.

I suggest the addition of a perfect tense for these languages.

[mr-martian]

Here's what I understand to be the features distinguishing Ancient Greek verbs:

Form	Tense	Aspect
present	Pres	Imp
perfect	Pres	Perf
future	Fut	Imp
future perfect	Fut	Perf
aorist	Past	Perf
imperfect	Past	Imp
pluperfect	Pqp	Perf

[jpharper]

I generally agree with the table above, except that the perfect form should definitely not be classified as a "present" tense with perfective aspect. Generally most lemmatizers like Stanford's Stanza which use UD will classify the Greek perfect as a "past" tense with "perfect" aspect, thus indistinguishable from the aorist form. That's why I am proposing an additional tense.

[Stormur]

It is actually debatable whether they are both perfective. In fact, it seems to be warranted a distinction between perfective Perf and perfect Pfv (see W. Klein's Time in Language, p. 109ff), which we are also considering to introduce for Latin, too. At the moment, only Beja is using Pfv, though.

Pqp is a problematic "cumulative" value which would then be replaced by the use of Pfv and the respective tense. The same for Aorist and Perfect in Greek (though I am not sure about the exact combinations). Just for comparisons, the Latin Perfect could be treated as Aspect=Perf|Tense=Pres, while the plusquamperfect as Aspect=Pfv|Tense=Past, and then, even if it were decided to give a past value to the Latin Perfect (which is debatable!), it would be distinguishable as Aspect=Perf|Tense=Past.

In general I do not think it makes sense to introduce a new Tense, especially if language-specific, since I do not see space for other values beyond the "basic three". Labels in traditional grammars are usually an amalgamation of features which in UD are treated analytically.

[jpharper]

Thank you, I see that options are being considered to enrich tense and aspect representation generally. I would appreciate it if others with a good knowledge of Ancient Greek would weigh in here, but I would argue that the Greek perfect should be classified as past tense with perfect aspect and the aorist as past tense with perfective aspect. This would entail adding a perfective aspect (Pfv) for Ancient Greek and this is probably a better route to go than an additional "tense".