"The Imperial Gerund: Tense and Tension in Language"

Ivo Strecker and Baye Yimam

Our point of departure is the fact that just as tension is inherent in nature and in human experience it is inherent in grammar. To demonstrate this, we begin by asking the audience to listen to two examples where the 'imperial' gerund is used to produce tension. The cases come from two contexts, one is global - a United Nations Declaration - and one is local - a recorded speech from Hamar, southern Ethiopia.
Then follows a comparative analysis of the gerund in Amharic and Hamar with the intention to show the rhetoric function of the gerund which lies mainly in its ability of introducing a theme, or series of themes, and sustaining it (them) to an ultimate end. All the way through, there is aspect in the gerund of both languages, and the suspense or tension relates to this fact. The tension gets relaxed with the introduction of the verb of the main clause.
At the end of the paper, we venture into some general ideas about rhetoric language theory for which we have invented one more of those ugly acronyms that linguists are so fond of. RLT, we argue, is based on the observation that language and mind are dialogically grounded and that thinking and speaking are co-emergent. Here RLT follows a tradition of thought that goes back at least as far as Wilhelm von Humboldt and his peers. But, to quote Stephen Tyler, "The idea of independent and autonomous objects, described by independent autonomous subjects by means of independent and autonomous media of description is too simple". Therefore present day RLT focuses on the "action and interaction that produces both object (language) and subject (speaker/hearer) as self-organizing configurations" (Tyler 2002:7).
To a large extent, RLT derives its force from earlier and current debates about the innateness of linguistic faculties, and it grows by trying to reject the view that the principles of universal grammar are genetically encoded. True, just as nature has endowed mankind with the diagnostic feature of walking, so it has given it prosodic propensities and the gift of thinking and talking. But this does not mean that universal grammar is in our unhappy genes, because there is no need for this as its principles and parameters are already there in our natural and social universe. The present and future task of RLT is to explore this resonant relationship between our outer and inner worlds.

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