[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects
Mitch Larramore
mitchlarramore at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 14 22:44:40 EDT 2006
Dr. Randall Buth wrote:
<snip>
I submit that one of us is reading the signals
'inside-out'.
Let us look at Jude 14.
We agree that 'context' (in this case encyclopedic
background
knowledge) provides the future setting for the verb
HLQEN.
Randall (me) argues that HLQEN refers backwards in
time which results
in an understanding that the author has taken a
vantage point (deictic
centre) in the future and is looking back in time to
the 'coming'.
Cindy (you) argues above that HLQEN expresses a change
in the
speaker's viewpoint. to be honest, I cannot see how
that lines up with
your theoretical position or differs from my own. Why
would the
deictic centre have to move in Cindy's theory? The
aorist indicative
would simply refer to an event that happens to be
future. the only
reason for moving the deictic centre would be if it
were necessary to
include a semantic feature of 'non-future' time.
<snip>
Why is it necessary to introduce a "looking back in
time" (as if some hypothetical person is standing at
some location looking back/toward the past) or a
"speaker's viewpoint" (as if we need to understand
some event in relation to the speaker)? Why not have a
deicitc center that is some event itself, and tense
indicates how events are related to each other. In
Jude 15, the event of the Lord coming "to execute
judgment" is future in relation to the Lord's coming
(and the Lord's coming is obviously past in relation
to his executing judgment), but who cares from where
some hypothetical person is viewing it, or where the
speaker is located?
I read in the archives that the historic present is
not historic if we understand it simply in relation to
the deictic center. Why say it is 'historic' as if a
viewpoint of a reader needs to be taken into
consideration at all? If the deictic center is Event
X, and the present is used to indicate that Event Y is
also in progress, why call Event Y a 'historical'
anything? It is not 'historic' in relation to Event X;
it is only historic if we force a reader's viewpoint
on it.
Mitch Larramore
Sugar Land, Texas
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