[B-Greek] Aspect

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Feb 12 10:15:20 EST 2004


At 5:25 AM -0800 2/12/04, Mitch Larramore wrote:
>Since the Present tense had to do "double duty" for
>the Perfective and Imperfective aspects (what about
>the Stative?), can I conclude that ASPECT is not
>something inherent to the verb?

NO. It is certainly valid to think of the Greek verb as having three
distinct aspectual forms: perfective, imperfective, and stative. The
present tense is somewhat more complicated in Greek (and in English too) in
that the indicative is used not at all uncommonly to express that may be
undefined (as we discussed yesterday or recently). Outside the indicative,
the aspectual character of each "tense" is more strictly employed. The real
problem in describing the Greek verb (one of several real problems!) is
that the "tense" stems have much more to do with ASPECT than they do with
time. It might be preferable in practice, although less convenient, to use
the term "tense-aspect" for the "tenses." But this is not the only
poorly-descriptive term in our grammatical vocabulary for ancient Greek.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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