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Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 16th, 2014, 1:36 pm
by RandallButh
Yes, they kept the terms straight in class.

Maybe ask them again in five years.

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 16th, 2014, 2:41 pm
by MAubrey
RandallButh wrote:Yes, they kept the terms straight in class.

Maybe ask them again in five years.
I'm doing fine 5 years on.

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 16th, 2014, 4:54 pm
by RandallButh
Michael, you live and breathe linguistics, I'm talking about the student who learns the concepts and then is out of touch for a goodly season. Will they remember which features go with "achievement" and which with "accomplishment"? Well, against my own argument, I do have to use these terms from time to time, I just pray that they communicate with audiences next week at ETS/SBL.

It is also why I don't think that "they" should call λαμβάνειν a "present" infinitive. Because it isn't.

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 16th, 2014, 5:01 pm
by Stephen Carlson
TimNelson wrote:Sorry. The place I first ran across the whole question of verbal aspect was in a work which also discussed essives, namely, Waltke and O'Connor's work on Hebrew Syntax. My understanding is that, according to the WOC (Waltke/O'Connor) use of the terms, an essive is a temporary state (ie. "Bob is being silly") as opposed to a permanent state (ie. "Bob is silly"). With apologies to Bob too :).
Gotcha. Though I'm surprised "essive" was used for this, as it has different meanings, and the citation you helpfully gave in another post only has "stative."

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 16th, 2014, 5:07 pm
by Stephen Carlson
RandallButh wrote:Yes, 'accomplishment' and 'achievement' are better than Latin,
but they are also synonyms is plain-vanilla English, so something better would help people keep them apart and not need to redefine/reexplain them everytime a discussion on them arises.

Maybe one could be called an 'incremental goal' (search for) and the other an 'actualization' (find).
Yes, accomplishment and achievement bug me too for the same reasons. Sometimes I wish to propose something different, but I'm afraid we'd end up in the situation illustrated in his comic:

Image

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 16th, 2014, 5:37 pm
by MAubrey
RandallButh wrote:Michael, you live and breathe linguistics, I'm talking about the student who learns the concepts and then is out of touch for a goodly season.

Well, I think that's the difference. Most of the students I have lectured are either headed toward SIL or have returned from the field for graduate studies. Granted, not all of them are going to descriptive linguistics. Some will do literacy. Some will focus more on translation. Some will work on language survey work. But it's a very different context than what you encounter at the Biblical Language Center. The greatest frustration for many of them is that fact that the textbooks they're using when they take introductory Greek & Hebrew and exegesis class is that they're forced into learning an entirely new set of terminology that has little in common with what they've already spent two to three semesters already learning. So right now, that's my biggest priority: working with the school for creating relevant coursework for Greek grammar & exegesis that takes what they already know as a starting work. I have a syllabus proposal submitted. Hopefully, in the next year or two it will become a reality.
RandallButh wrote:It is also why I don't think that "they" should call λαμβάνειν a "present" infinitive. Because it isn't.
I back you on that 100%.

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 17th, 2014, 3:55 am
by George F Somsel
Carl Conrad wrote
It really is important in these discussions to clarify the meanings of words that most of us have never seen before and that are being used in a sense at which we lesser mortals have to make the best educated guess we can.
Whatever anyone else says, you are not a "lesser mortal." The original poster may have been referencing an earlier version of Waltke and O'Connor since I do not find "essive" in my copy but rather "fientive" which you suggested might be more easily understood.

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 17th, 2014, 4:24 am
by TimNelson
Just to clarify:
a) I suspect that essive didn't come from WOC; I had two sets of notes next to each other, and one set was derived from WOC, and the other was derived partly from WOC and partly from something I found on the Internet at some point; I think "essive" came from the Internet, and I was confused when I attributed it to WOC.
b) WOC use "stative" and "fientive", but they use "fientive" to refer to [-state] verbs (Sihler calls these "eventive" verbs in his New Comparative Grammar). This is different than an essive. An essive is a [+state] verb (just like a stative), but is also [+telic], in that the state will presumably end sometime.

But I agree that Carl is no mere mortal :).

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 17th, 2014, 5:11 am
by Stephen Carlson
TimNelson wrote:a) I suspect that essive didn't come from WOC; I had two sets of notes next to each other, and one set was derived from WOC, and the other was derived partly from WOC and partly from something I found on the Internet at some point; I think "essive" came from the Internet, and I was confused when I attributed it to WOC.
Well, I think that clears up the mystery of essive, though it dead-ends rather unhelpfully to "found on the Internet." That said, I don't recommend the term: it is at best rare if not idiosyncratic, and it is not really intuitive to those not familiar with the label but familiar with the concept. "Temporary state" is probably fine. It could be worse; at least you're not calling it "pofective."

Re: Verb catalog - lexical aspect

Posted: November 17th, 2014, 6:55 am
by Barry Hofstetter
Just a couple of comments on this discussion:

1) I know exactly how Carl feels. I took linguistics courses as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and even had a bit of exposure in seminary, and I still have to look stuff up when you guys get technical. It makes me glad that you don't have to be an expert in linguistics to learn how to use a language.

2) Achievement and accomplishment both derive from Latin, so there!