[B-Greek] Rewrite of Mounce 2nd ed ch. 20 by Decker
waldo slusher
waldoslusher at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 22 13:32:57 EST 2004
Rolf
I agree with your assessment here with a few
exceptions (nothing major). I have not found but 2
non-past referring Aorists in my studies. And I am not
so sure these 2 cannot be explained. I think Wallace's
explanation of Romans 8:30 makes perfect sense. The
reason I disagree with Olsen's "cancellability"
concept is because I can cancel an adverb
(pragmatically) by making it function as a noun, but
the adverb still remains an adverb (semantically). It
wouldn't surprise me if an Aorist's inherent past
tenseness could be cancelled (pragmatically) without
cancelling its inherent temporal nature
(semantically). What surprises me is that I can't find
hardly any Aorists whose relation to the deictic
center isn't anterior. I would have expected to find
much more, just like in English. I have done little
study on the presentness of the Present Tense in
relation to the deictic center, something I plan to do
shortly.
My hat is off to your accomplishment concerning the
Hebrew verb!! I am nearing a completion of such a task
with the Aorist Indicative.
Waldo
> I agree with you Rod that it is extremely important
> to differentiate
> between semantics and pragmatics. But such a
> distinction leads me to
> differentiate between *temporal reference* and
> *tense*; the first
> being pragmatic and the second semantic. Comrie's
> definition of tense
> is "grammaticalized location in time," which means
> that past tense is
> when reference time (RT) intersects event time (ET)
> before the
> deictic center (C), and future tense is when RT
> intersects ET after C
> (I fully agree with Mari Broman Olsen here). I do
> not see how it is
> meaningful to speak about "tense" in a pragmatic
> sense.
>
> In my view we do not need a redefinition of tense,
> but we strongly
> need an elucidation of aspect, in order to get rid
> of misleading
> terms such as punctiliar, durative, complete,
> completed, incomplete
> and others. Just as important as it is to
> distinguish between
> pragmatics and semantics, it is to distinguish
> between aspects in
> different languages, because their nature are
> different (here I
> disagree with Mari). I use three different
> parameters when I compare
> aspects between languages, and because there are
> two aspects, the
> aspects can be compared in six different areas. Mari
> has described an
> excellent model for the English aspectual system,
> and when I apply my
> parameters in a comparison of English and Hebrew
> aspects (I work
> primarily with Hebrew and secondarily with Greek), I
> find that the
> aspects are similar in three areas and different in
> three. But
> because the aspects are different in both areas
> which are the most
> important ones, the two aspectual systems are
> completely different.
> As to English and Greek, I find the same differences
> as between
> English and Hebrew: three are similar and three are
> different, and
> the two most important ones are different. So the
> aspectual systems
> of English and Greek are completely different.
>
> I have now completed an analysis of all the 70.000
> finite and
> infinite verbs of the Hebrew Bible, the DSS and the
> inscriptions as
> to temporal reference, modality and certain
> syntactical traits and
> aspectual characteristics. My conclusion is that
> tense is not found
> in the Hebrew verbal system; no particular verb form
> codes for a
> particular location in time. Thus past reference and
> future reference
> must be construed on the basis the context. As to
> aspect, I conclude
> that all prefix forms (WAYYIQTOL, WEYIQTOL, YIQTOL)
> represent the
> imperfective aspect (though defined differently
> compared with its
> English counterpart) and all suffix forms (QATAL and
> WEQATAL)
> represent the perfective aspect. In order to get
> solid results when I
> apply my model to "Koine"-Greek, I would have to
> analyze *all*, or at
> least most of the verbs, which I have not done yet.
> However, my
> tentative results are that future and imperfect
> represent tenses
> "grammaticalized location in time" (imperfect being
> a combination of
> past tense and the imperfective aspect), while
> aorist and present do
> not code for tense, but represent the perfective and
> imperfective
> aspect respectively.
>
> A weakness of many Greek grammars, in my view, is
> that aspect is only
> superficially defined, and no attempt is made to
> find the "deep
> structures" of the aspects (to use a concept from
> Chomsky as a
> metaphor). If there is the realization that aspect
> is different in
> different languages, one simply is forced to
> penetrate deeper into
> the subject aspect. So that is a good starting
> point. And to the
> student who started this discussion: It is good to
> start with
> learning the fundamental definitions of verbs in
> grammars that
> express traditional views. Having done that, you
> should develop
> skepticism and think that some of these are probably
> inaccurate, and
> then read other works which present radical
> viewpoints. You can learn
> much from this, but of course, the most important
> thing is to work
> thoroughly with the Greek text yourself and make
> your own analyses of
> great portions of text.
>
>
> Best regards
>
> Rolf Furuli
> University of Oslo
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