toward a definition of Verbal Apect
Ron Fay
roncfay at hotmail.com
Mon Nov 4 18:33:51 EST 2002
>I'm confused over Jonathan's example of Mary entering the house, and
>Stagg's example of Romans 3:22-23 in the prior message by Calton. I
>believe both are in the indicative? I thought that, for indicative, the
>aorist or present were indicators of time in relation to the speaker, e.g.
>past or present. I did not think aspect (ongoing vs. point-in-time) could
>be determined in the indicative.
>
>Likewise, I was under the impression that outside the indicative (the
>infinitive for example), aorist or present do not tell us about time, but
>only about aspect.
I would disagree with this a lot. What you are discussing here is
Aktionsart theory, which I believe has many problems. For example, why have
such a thing as "the historic present" which is just a label for the present
being used for the past? Or how about the "gnomic aorist," which
essentially is an aorist usage that carries a lack of time, something
opposed to your paradigm. Aspect is found by the morphological "tense," and
time is only generally indicated by the morphological tense (i.e. the
present tense is 85% of the time actually present time, but 15% of the time
it is not, according to Porter).
>I thought it was an either-or situation, kind of like the Heisenberg
>Uncertainty principle. You can either know the speed of an electron or
>its position, but not both. So in Greek aorist/present -- in the
>indicative you can know the tense, but not aspect. Outside of the
>indicative you can know the aspect, but not the tense!
>
>Thanks,
>Dale Noonan
It is not an either or, it is more of a both and. You always know the
aspect, and most of the occurences will give you the time as well. However,
how can something that is correct only 80-85% of the time be considered a
good indicator, when something else carries it effectively much closer to
100% of the time? In my book, aspect wins out.
________________________________________________
Ron Fay
Ph. D. student and New Testament Teaching Fellow
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Deerfield, IL.
roncfay at hotmail.com
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