[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Fri Sep 15 05:03:27 EDT 2006


Shalom Mitch,
comments follow

On 9/15/06, Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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

The problem is a complication that arises from talking about a
language. When a person is simply talking these shifts happen
automatically, but when trying to describe these shifts an extra layer
is added as a framework in order to allow us to talk about these
things.

Consider an ENGLISH sentence,
Enoch prophesied, "The Lord arrived with myriads of his saints -- "
The 'prophesy' is marked as past to the speaker's viewpoint. And
within the quotation "arrived" sounds like a past, but a past to what?
If it has never yet happened in the history of the world, then it is
not past to Enoch, nor past to the writer, but future to both. How do
we describe the English prophecy? the statement is spoken from a
viewpoint that is after the coming. The effect becomes visionary, I
person is reporting something that hasn't happened as though it had
happened. Technically speaking, this is outside of grammar.
Grammar/syntax does not mark an interpretative framework but works
within an interpretative framework. Explaining how that works (as
opposed to just doing the communication) requires the extra
description of changing viewpoints, an extra layer, as it were.

In your Greek example, 'the Lord's coming' is past to something and
'to execute judgement' is still potential/future. So where is the
person's point of view? Some undefined area between 'the coming' and
'executing'. That would be called the deictic centre, but it isn't a
particular event in the text, it is the virtual window out from which
someone is looking.

You also mentioned the narrative present. You are correct that they
momentarily change a deictic centre. A person views the event as
though they were there. They are also strange in another way,
aspectually they are quasi-aoristic. They are looking at complete
events from within (!) without marking their completion. A string of
these narrative presents A,B,C can proceed thru a series of events
that were obviously completed sequentially, and the reader is assumed
to recognize that, yet the verbs only portrary the event as it is
happening.

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


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