[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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