Aspect of the Greek Verb

hefin jones hefinjones at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 17 06:33:24 EST 2002


Fully recognising the terminological, as well as paradigmatic minefield I 
really do have a problem with the not infrequent attempt to describe the 
aorist forms as "action seen as complete or as a whole". Part of the problem 
lies that such a description is too easily confused with perfect/perfective 
(3. in Eric's scheme below). As yet I'm unshaken not only from my 
Porter-esque notion that the aorist goes not grammaticalise time, but also 
neither does it actually grammaticalise aspect. If you want to, you could 
describe it as 0-aspect ("Null-aspect"). Hence the parallel I tried to bring 
out in my original "teaching aspect via english" between greek aorist and 
english simple forms. The aorist is literally "undefined", not only with 
respect to time (so Aristotle), but also aspect.

Hefin Jones






>From: "Eric S. Weiss" <eweiss at gte.net>
>Reply-To: "Eric S. Weiss" <eweiss at gte.net>
>To: Biblical Greek <b-greek at franklin.oit.unc.edu>
>Subject: [b-greek] Re: Aspect of the Greek Verb
>Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 23:53:18 -0500
>
>Different grammars/teachers/authors use different terms for the three
>aspects:
>
>a. continuous, undefined, and perfect (William Mounce - GREEK FOR THE REST
>OF US (to be published March 2003)
>
>b. linear, punctilear, and combined (Edward Goodrick - DO IT YOURSELF
>HEBREW AND GREEK)
>
>c. imperfective, perfective, and stative (Stanley Porter - IDIOMS OF THE
>GREEK NEW TESTAMENT).
>
>Using Mounce's terminology (a. above), their respective terms would be
>similarly defined by all these teachers as something like:
>     1. Continuous: action seen as in progress
>     2. Undefined: action seen as complete or viewed as a whole
>     3. Perfect: action seen as reflecting a state, focusing on either the
>completed nature of the past action(s) that resulted in the state, or on
>the state itself
>
>---
>B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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