[B-Greek] Re.. Imperfect and Aorist Aspects!

Brian Abasciano bvabasciano at gmail.com
Thu Sep 7 15:41:20 EDT 2006


This discussion brings me back to a question I asked several weeks ago after I first joined the list. I asked what people thought about aspect theory, Porter, etc., and was directed to the archives. That is a perfectly understandable response to my former query. But part of what I was wanting was to see where everyone was at. In a sense I am interested to see who buys aspect theory and to what extent, a poll of sorts for those involved with B-Greek in order to get a pulse on what sort of inroads aspect theory a la Porter et al has made into Greek scholarship. It would appear to me that it is still the minority view, perhaps evidenced by Wallace's rejection of it in what seems like the most used (or perhaps I should say cited; and this is not to say most authoritative; for that I would still say it is BDF) intermediate/advanced grammar. However, there was an article in JETS recently by Robert Picirilli arguing that aspect theory has won the day (I have not read through it yet however and am not sure if that is his estimation of the evidence or of scholarly opinion).

So I am wondering if people would not mind stating where they are on the issue at present. Cindy's position is obvious. I will start off by saying that I do not fully accept aspect theory as propounded by Porter, though I believe that it has made very significant contributions that have changed my approach to Greek so that my approach is now a combination of aspect and the traditional approach. I accept certain aspects (pun intended) of aspect theory and reject others, retain certain aspects of the traditional appproach and modify others. In particular, I believe that the choice of tense does depict the type of action in general along the lines of tradional categories but in the subjective view of the author, not as a claim that the action took place objectively in that way, but in the way the author desires to portray the action for whatever reason at the time of writing. I can accept that time is not necessarily inherent in what we call Greek tense, but that the tenses do have unmarked time value that context can indicate are other than the typical time value associted with the tense in question.

Do not feel you have to say a lot on this, though please feel free to do so. The more the better. But even if people indicate a yeah or nay on aspect theory (though I suspect most views would not be so clear cut), that would still be helpful to get a beat on where the subscibers of this list are at at least, and hopefully that would be some (even if not scientifically reliable) indication of where Greek scholarship is at in general.

Thank you and may God bless you,

Brian Abasciano

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Elizabeth, Bill, Paul and all
 
 I just read this thread this morning, and though I'm not sure that you'll all feel that I do a better job of explaining, or that I'll settle the issue for you, I'm glad to make a "few" comments about aspect, and apologize for the length of the post.
 
 First, I follow Porter's argument closely with the exception of the imperfect, and Levinsohn and I are quite close in how we think the imperfect functions, though we would describe it differently. 
 
 Incidentally, Porter's work is the result of an interdisciplinary doctoral thesis with the linguistics and the biblical studies departments at Sheffield, backed with an MA in English at Claremont--and I say this to clarify the thorougly linguistic foundation of the approach. More recently, a close associate (Matt O'Donnel--the creator of OpenText.org) has received a two year appointment to work with Michael Hoey (one of the most prominent systemic functional linguists) on his lexical priming theory. 
 
 In SFL aspect theory as Elizabeth and others have indicated, the aorist is simple, undefinied and default action. Like William Ross has so aptly observed, there are so many examples of the aorist referring to continual, gnomic, repeated, present and future, that time would fail me to list them to say nothing of space. See Porter's work on aspect. Therefore past is not considered to be part of the minimal semantic contribution of the aorist. 
 
 How do we know the aorist is present, future, etc. in those cases? The context supplies the temporal information. How do we know if an aorist is past? The context supplies the temporal information. Fact: the aorist does occur (collocate) with the past the most, hence the common assumption that it is past. When it doesn't, people make up cute categories such as "the gnomic aorist" as if that has explanatory power. Just look in the back of Wallace for all the categories that the aorist has to be qualified with if we retain a traditional approach.
 
 As far as Mounce goes, I would not advise you to use most first grammars as a source for an intermediate or advanced understanding of grammar such as verbal theory. We've all found that some of our first year assumptions don't hold up, but hopefully they got us by without too much damage. Mounce is aware of at least some of the discussion on aspect, but doesn't really buy it or process it--he tries to incorporate it with his more traditional understanding of grammar. And no, he didn't just do an etymological trick to come up with his statement. But I doubt that Mounce would have used the term "default" to describe it either.
 
 Paul Evans made some insightful statements about the importance of mood--and those who work out of a systemic functional linguistics framework (Porter, Reed, O'Donnell, Black, Levinsohn and a growing number of SIL linguists, me, etc.) would say that every grammatical choice effects/reflects meaning. As far as the use of the default aorist in statements that are theologically significant, that is consistent with this grammatical theory when one understands that one may use an important and profound theological point to ground the point one is making in the text (and ultimately, the "main point" of the text does not have to be more theologically important than its support material). In other words, one may cite a huge theological principle (such as Jesus was raised from the dead) to make a specific application that only applies to one point in time--but in the instance of communication, the application is the emphatic point, not the resurrection--the resurrection would be a gi
 ven that doesn't need to be proven or emphasized. And speaking of resurrection, look at how tense is used with EGEIRW in 1 Cor 15 (especially around 15:15). Aspect theory would suggest that the author's aspect is changing, not the nature of the action--that a switch from perfect to aorist (present too) reflects a change in the status of the action in emphasis/focus/prominence. Of course it can't be a different kind of action (actionsart) when both tenses refer to the same action of Christ's resurrection. 
 
 The use of the imperfect is for remote undefined action, and the perfect is close undefined action--I agree that the imperfect is "marked" but for the special function it serves of marking background/support rather than emphasis--and here is where I part with Stan Porter. In narrative, it is the ongoing contextual backdrop to a scene in which the discourse action line occurs in the aorist, as in your example in John 8:30. On the other hand, if a scene is set up with one or more imperfects, that sets the table more emphatically than a scene without background detail--so markedness theory wills out after all. The genitive absolute functions in a similar way, but is formally linked to a sentence rather than the higher level of discourse.
 
 This is more than enough space used, and I haven't yet added many examples. But you do see the theory, I hope. 
 
 Cindy Westfall
 Assistant Professor
 McMaster Divinity College



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