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
>You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [hefinjones at hotmail.com]
>To unsubscribe, forward this message to
>$subst('Email.Unsub')
>To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek at franklin.oit.unc.edu
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list