Fanning and Porter

Harry W. Jones hwjones2 at earthlink.net
Thu Dec 5 21:09:03 EST 2002



I appreciate your help Penner. You have gone a long way in helping me to
understand what's going on.

God Bless,
Harry Jones
 
The fool has said in his
heart,there is no God. Ps. 14:1

But they that wait upon the
Lord shall renew their
strength. They shall run 
and not be weary. And they
shall walk and not faint. Isa. 40:39



> [Original Message]
> From: Penner <pennerkm at mcmaster.ca>
> To: Harry  W. Jones <hwjones2 at earthlink.net>
> Cc: Biblical Greek <b-greek at franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
> Date: 12/5/02 6:25:12 AM
> Subject: RE: [b-greek] Fanning and Porter
>
> Dear Harry,
>
> In response to your question,
>
> > Does anybody know what the differences are between Fanning=20
> > and Porter?
>
> I did my first Master's degree with a focus on Greek Verbal Aspect,
> before Mari Olsen's work was available.
>
> A. NT Greek Verbal Aspect theory
>
> =93Verbal aspect=94 is a grammatical category which marks an author's
> reasoned subjective choice of the conception of a process. In the NT
> Greek system, two major options an author has to portray the viewpoint
> are Internal and External, with Stative as a third possibility advanced
> by Porter. The internal perspective is expressed through the
> Present/Imperfect tenses, the external through the Aorist tense, and the
> stative through the Perfect/Pluperfect tenses. The Future tense =
> doesn=92t
> fit well into Porter's aspect theory, but a study by Mark O=92Brien
> suggests that its aspect is similar to the Aorist=92s.
> Verbal aspect has become important in NT Greek studies this century by
> replacing other, less adequate ways of describing the semantic freight
> of the tenses. First, proponents of aspect theory argue that Greek
> tenses do not denote absolute time. Specifically, the aorist tense does
> not mean past time, and the present tense does not mean present time.
> Second, they argue that Greek tenses do not mark Aktionsart, the kind of
> action. The aorist does not mark "once-for-all" action, nor does the
> present mark durative action. Whereas Aktionsart is an objective
> category (the action is the same no matter how it is viewed), aspect is
> subjective.
> Rather, an author chooses a tense based on how he wishes to depict an
> event. Porter uses the illustration of a parade to help visualise the
> three aspects. A person on the street watching a parade, in the middle
> of the action has an internal perspective; the appropriate aspect to
> describe this detailed perspective would be Imperfective. A reporter
> watching the same parade from a helicopter above sees the entire event;
> his perspective is external, and would be grammaticalized with the
> Perfective aspect. Finally, the parade organiser might be in an office
> looking at the parade as a state of affairs; the stative aspect would
> describe his viewpoint.
> The major implication of this view on NT exegesis is that we can no
> longer use a verb's tense to tell us something about the action itself
> (whether it is past or present, once-for-all or ongoing), but that we
> must use it to understand the way the author wanted to depict it. The
> tense tells us more about what was happening inside the author's mind
> than about the external world he was describing.
>
> B. Differences between Porter and Fanning
>
> Stanley Porter and Buist Fanning have independently and almost
> simultaneously produced major works on verbal aspect in New Testament
> Greek. That they agree so closely in their theories of verbal aspect is
> remarkable. That their conclusions vary so greatly is almost as notable.
> Both Porter and Fanning hold to the general view of verbal aspect
> outlined above in section A, though Fanning would not classify the
> Stative as an aspect in its own right, but considers the Perfect and
> Pluperfect as combinations of aspect, Aktionsart and tense. They both
> consider an author's choice of tense to follow a system of "equipollent
> binary oppositions", in a tree of logical branches. At each junction,
> the author can follow one of two paths. Once he chooses one branch, the
> options in the other are no longer available to him. For example, in
> Porter's system once an author has chose the path of [- expectation], he
> can no longer arrive at the Future tense.
> Where Porter and Fanning diverge is in their goal. Whereas Fanning wants
> to help exegetes, Porter writes for linguists. Fanning's focus is
> practical, and Porter's is more theoretical. Porter wishes to define a
> linguistic system that needs no exceptions. His desire for a perfectly
> "clean" system leads him to argue that tenses carry only aspect
> unambiguously.
> Fanning maintains that the meaning of any particular verbal form depends
> heavily on lexis (the meaning of the verb itself) and deixis (contextual
> factors). He suggests that the verbal form itself takes on this extra
> meaning. Porter would agree that pragmatics (the meaning of a specific
> use of a verb) depends on these factors, but he would sharply
> distinguish pragmatics from semantics (the unambiguous meaning carried
> by the tense in general).
> Fanning's approach is more conservative and exegetical. He wishes to
> maintain continuity with the old understanding of the tenses. He ends up
> demonstrating how many of the tense categories (such as historic
> present) came to be invented, and how much more neatly they fit the new
> model of verbal aspect. Yet in so doing, the difference between aspect
> and Aktionsart often becomes blurred. For example, Fanning talks about
> the Gnomic Present as "the use of the present to express timeless,
> universal occurrences" (p. 208). Porter wants to throw out the old
> categories, with their misleading labels and backgrounds in faulty
> mind-sets, and create new ones based on the new aspect model. For
> example, he rejects the notion that the augment marks any time
> significance. In his enthusiasm for rejecting the old view of tenses, he
> has gone against years of what seems intuitive to most grammarians.
>
> Ken Penner, M.C.S. (Biblical Languages, Greek Focus), M.A. (Hebrew
> Poetry)
> Ph.D. Student, McMaster University
> pennerkm at mcmaster.ca
> Flash! Pro: http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/westerholm/flash or
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flash_pro/join or=20
> http://sensoft.nav.to





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