[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

Rolf Furuli furuli at online.no
Sun Sep 10 10:12:03 EDT 2006


Dear Randall,

I agree that our approach to language is very different. And since there is 
no superior authority that can decide which approah is the best, we can only 
respect one another´s work - as we do. I do not think the listmembers will 
benefit from hairsplitting linguistic arguments. But to understand the 
frames of our different approaches can be beneficial.

The tendency in much modern linguistic work on dead languages is to lean to 
the side of discours analysis, i.e., to deal with units lanrger then the 
clause and the sentence. I have gone in the opposite direction - the way of 
the natural sciences - by dealing with the smallest linguistic units. This 
means that my quest is for the rather few linguistic units of a language 
whose semantic meaning (uncancellable meaning) can be established with a 
great deal of certainty. In other words, semantic meaning (uncancellable 
meaning) is sought in contrast with conversational pragmatic implicature; 
quality is sought rather than quantity. Past is the most common reference of 
the aorist in NT Greek. Why? The reason can be that the aorist represents 
grammaticalized past tense, that it represent the perfective (or even the 
imperfective) aspect, or that it represents the combination of past tense 
and the perfective aspect. How can we know? In my view the only way to draw 
a well reasoned conclusion is to analyse ALL the NT aorists (as well as the 
other finite verbs). We need parameters by which we can sort out the factors 
that definitely show that a particular verb is a tense or is not a tense, is 
an aspect, or is not an aspect. Discourse analysis and similar methods are 
completely impotent in achieving this; we need instead to deal with much 
smaller  linguistic units.

Allow me one example from Hebrew: The imperfect consequtive (WAYYIQTOL) is 
by most scholars believed to have a meaning opposite to imperfect (YIQTOL). 
A morphological distinction believed to signal a semantic distinction is 
that the imperfect consecutive prefers the short form of the verb while 
imperfect prefers the long form. My analysis of all the WAYYIQTOLs show that 
73% of them have long forms and only 27% have short forms. Yet, I agree with 
those who say that the imperfect consecutive prefers the short form, because 
the nature of most of the 73% (but not all) prevents them from using the 
short form. It is really fallacious to say: "Aorist has in most cases past 
reference, and therefore it must represent past tense." This can only be a 
pragmatic and not a semantic conclusion! We must find out WHY so many 
aorists have past reference, and should not decide the answer in advance.

snip
>
> Rolf EGRAPSE
>>I accept exceptions. But each of them
> must be shown to a special case. Jude 14 is hardly a special case. We do 
> not
> know whether the verse is a quote, and even if it were a quote (from 
> another
> language than Greek), Jude was the one who chose  the aorist. Therefore, 
> in
> Jude´s mind an aorist with future reference would be perfectly 
> acceptable.>
>
> We radically differ here. I see the HLQEN as causing a change of
> speaker viewpoint. It is looking back to the past, but since it is
> talking about something that has not happened in our world
> view/encyclopedic knowledge, the reader and speaker are taking a view
> from the future. The context supplies the 'future' here, the aorist
> indicative supplies a past viewpoint. And I would argue that this is
> highly marked and very rare. (If one seriously wanted to argue with
> that, then just show me some *AURION HLQEN examples. See below.) Greek
> marks default future reference with the FUTURE verb system. Jude was
> happy with both default futures and rare pragmatics. But I
> differentiate an aorist being used in a future context from an aorist
> having future reference, and the former does not rule out its carrying
> a '+past feature'. It does not have future reference/marking. Just
> like a French future can be used in a past narrative. the French
> future does not mark the past, but it is used in the past even though
> it marks future. (Thus, absolute non-cancelability is often an
> unattainable ideal for human languages. Sometimes one needs to go
> beyond Euclidean geometry and build non-Euclidean geometries in order
> to deal with the real world.)

Your words above illustrate one important difference between our approaches. 
You have already decided many things before you start your analysis; one 
decision evidently being that aorist cannot have future reference. This is 
shown by your words that you "differentiate an aorist being used in a future 
context from an aorist
having future reference, and the former does not rule out its carrying a 
'+past feature'." It is of course your privilege to make such decisions. My 
system does not accept such decisions. I accept that some writers have a 
retrospective viewpoint; they place themselves at a point in the future and 
look back. My system requires that the context must explicitly show that 
this is the case in a particular passage; I cannot claim so just because my 
view of the verb does not allow another interpretation. There is nothing in 
the context of Jude 1:14 suggesting that the aorist "supplies a past 
viewpoint," but this is based on your preconceived grammatical view. I even 
see the possibility that the two verbs in aorist indicative in 1:15 have 
future reference. I have already analysed these as future perfects, 
something which is likely, but if Jude focuses on the short time of 
judgement when the Lord comes, he may focus on the ungodly acts people (will 
/form his vantagepoint/) do at that time and the words that the sinners 
(will /from his vantagepoint/) speak.


snip

>
> ERRWSO
> Randall Buth
>
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
> שלום לכם וברכות
> ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
> randallbuth at gmail.com
> ---


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo 





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