[B-Greek] simple test *AURION HLQON -- "completed" and "incomplete"

Chet A. Creider creider at uwo.ca
Wed Dec 14 06:32:45 EST 2005


Rolf Furuli wrote:

> I challenge the traditional Greek aspectual definitions "completed"
and "incomplete".

I'm curious as to the tradition of the study of _Greek_ in which these
definitions are to be found.  It doesn't seem to be part of the English-
North American tradition at all, at least not in any of the major works:

BDF (p.166) writes of punctilinear (momentary) vs durative (linear vs
progressive) and then goes on to write, with respect to the aorist, that
"the action is conceived as a point with either the beginning or the end
emphasized ... or the action is conceived as a whole irrespective of its
duration"

Turner (vol. 3 of Moulton, Howard and Turner, p. 59) writes much the same:
(1) continuous (which grammarians call _linear_, and (2) instantaneous,
which they call punctilar.

Looking outside the NT Greek tradition, 
Goodwin (Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of The Greek Verb) writes (p.16)
"The aorist indicative expresses the simple occurrence of an action in past
time...this fundamental idea of simple occurrence remains the essential
characteristic of the aorist through all the dependent moods, however
indefinite they may be in regard to time."  The imperfect indicative
is characterized as "an action in its progress rather than as a simple
past occurrence (like the aorist)" (p.11-12).

Smyth (p.414 in the 2nd ed.) writes "The aorist ,,, is so named because
it does not show the limitation...of continuance (expressed by the imperfect)
or of completion with permanent result (expressed by the perfect).

Finally, in his monograph (_On Aspect Theory and Homeric Aspect_, 1974,
IJAL Monograph 26 = IJAL 40.4, Pt 2), the linguist Paul Friedrich writes,
'In traditional grammar, aorists were said to refer to "momentary action,
the point of beginning (ingressive aorist) or end (resultative aorist)'
[Friedrich cites Carl Buck's A Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin here].
On the other hand the aorist is also used for action within specific 
limits, and for what is called "process pure and simple, an abstraction
from any consideration of development".' (p.11)

Friedrich is also known as a Slavicist, and in the same monograph, in
writing of the infelicity of the use of the terms "perfective" and
"imperfective" in Slavic linguistics states that "it is the opposition of
COMPLETION/NONCOMPLETION that is fundamental in _all_ Slavic languages"
(p.29).  By implication, he feels that the terms completion/noncompletion
have no place in Greek linguistics.

It seems clear from these citations that the traditional view of the
aspectual distinctions in Greek grammar has nothing to do with the
opposition "completed"/"incomplete".  In general the traditional
view seems to be that each aspect has a core meaning and a variety
of related, more specialized meanings (which are not discussed here).
This view of the polysemy of grammatical categories is also found
with the Greek cases and in fact in the semantics of the categories
of the grammars of most if not all languages, just as polysemy is
found with lexical items.  It also accords well with prototype
theory in modern cognitive psychology.

Chet Creider




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