[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects
Randall Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Sun Sep 10 04:40:20 EDT 2006
From your double posting I am assuming that you would like a comment
on Jude 14.
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.)
In the meantime, I am waiting for ***AURION HLQEN. That is what I
claim is non-Greek, because the AURION sets the speakers viewpoint
before "tomorrow" and thus the HLQEN is blocked, not being able to
refer 'back' (aorist ind.) and 'forward' (AURION) simultaneously .
I've never seen one of these.
The fact that I've never seen one of these tells me that if I ever
do, it will definitely be a very special context. Since you "accept
exceptions", you will probably even grant me such exceptionality with
a smile, SHOULD ONE EXAMPLE EVER BE FOUND. (folks, the difficulty of
finding such, should signal that something is wrong with absolute
tense-less analyses. I would argue that only some kind of mixed
valent analysis will ever work in the real world). In the meantime,
as I've said, I can only say that aorist indicatives have something
in them that block their co-occurence in a clause with an explicit
future word like AURION. I call that a feature of TENSE.
I would link '+past' with AUXHSIS "augment" [E-] and recommend that
any learner do the same. Otherwise, you will enter a neat, but non-
real world, and difficult to leave. ("aspect-only" is subjective by
definition and potentially unfalsifiable if one only looks at aspect
and then demands "unique, always valid" meanings for any features
that are measurable. That's called a stacked deck. Hotel California.)
The lack of *AURION HLQEN is not a stacked deck, just a waving,
flashing red flag.
ERRWSO
Randall Buth
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