The paper assigns, in a ‘pointillistic’ structural profile, narrative functions to dyma and dyna, formal presentatives, in syntactic detail and macrosyntactic patterning, on the database of Kate Roberts’s short stories and novellas.1 The extensive distribution and rich functional range of these elements matches their formal complexity and narratological significance. This presentative pair, expanded by verbal, substantival or pronominal presentates, form six narrative tenses, distinct formally and functionally, in complex interplay with their environment.In fact, however, dyma and dyna comprise doubly two homonyms: dyma/dyna presentatives, and dyma/dyna referential pronouns, typically rhematic or focal.Following a descriptive breakdown of the syntactic properties of the presentatives, the Presentative Narrative Tenses (PNTs) I to VI are discussed.Functionally striking and statistically prevalent is (PNT I) # dyma + noun phrase/personal pronoun + yn-converb2#, where we encounter two homonymous sub-tenses: the first with specific scenic or theatrical (‘dramatic’, narratologically scene-setting) semantics; the second non-scenic, but tagmemically functional. It is noteworthy that the entire presentative clause is high-level, narratologically rhematic or focal to the preceding text: it contains the key event. The presentative signals immediacy between narrator, reader and narrated character.Two presentative narrative tenses are non-verbal: adverbial presentates (dramatic presentation of motion) and scenic presentation of nouns.Another major issue treated here concerns the anaphoric pronouns dyna and dyma, rhematic in Nominal Sentence and Cleft Sentence patterns.

H. J. Polotsky’s “Syntaxe amharique et syntaxe turque” (1960a), the Master’s only article in a properly speaking General Linguistics (typological-comparative) genre, the paper opening Polotsky’s Collected Papers (Jerusalem: the Magnes Press, 1971), has drawn little attention outside the small circle of the Jerusalem School and its adherents, perhaps because of an hermetic quality of style, as well as the exclusive Ethiopistic forum of publication. And yet, it is a wonderful fruit of Polotsky’s annus mirabilis, an insightful and sensitive exposé of an instance of the non-geographical, cross-genealogical Sprachbund and what may be called the historical-connection-indifferent typological rapprochement As is generally realized today, the Sprachbund phenomenon is varied and complex, reflecting the variety of languages-in-contact scenarios and their historical configuration. The relatively rare non-adjacent or non-geographical Sprachbund is less well understood and falls between the stools of typological and genetic comparison, and goes, to mix metaphors, against the grain of conventional comparativist temperament.The “Eurafrican” (so Wagner in Transactions of the Philological Society 1969) hypothesis, first outlined in modern times at least as early as 1990 by John Morris-Jones, has been for most of the last century associated almost exclusively with the names of Julius Pokorny and his disciple, Heinrich Wagner. I believe it now deserves detailed objective re-appreciation, in view of the considerable expansion in our knowledge of Celtic and the advance in the unveiling of the languages commonly known as Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic, and especially of Egyptian and Coptic. Although it is generally not clear which languages are invoked on the Afro-Asiatic side — “Semitic” (which languages?) “Egyptian” (which phase or phases in its near four millennia of evolution?), Arabic, North-West Semitic, Accadian, Berber — a vagueness contributive to the scepticism with which the theory is still regarded (not that there is a generally accepted idea about hierarchies and chronologies inside the Celtic branch of Indo-European); nor is there any real confidence about either the chronological parameters, or the hierarchical structuring of syntactical and non-syntactical comparata of the comparison.