[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Aspects
Eddie Mishoe
edmishoe at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 16 09:21:17 EDT 2006
Rolf wrote:
> 1) Consider all the aorists of the NT and a
> represantative number of
> classicl texts.
>
> 2) In each case make an analysis of whether the
> action/state comes before or
> after the deictic center or is contemporaneous with
> it. (Remember that the
> default position of the deictic center is speech
> time, and that evidence is
> necessary to account for another position).
Here Rolf is where I see our fundamental difference
You say that the deictic center (DC) is the time of
speech or writing. I simply do agree with this
assumption and see no linguistic basis for such a
conclusion. (I also consider your statement circular
reasoning, since it assumes DC is the time of speech
and/or writing and then concludes such). Which leads
me to this next observation...
Please consider the examples below: In
> example 1) it is signaled
> by the adverb and "was" that the action was
> completed before the deictic
> center.
> 1) Yesterday Rita was running.
We don't have much context to determine the DC yet,
but let's go with Yesterday. Rita's running is seen as
'in progress' at the time of the DC. The only thing I
can conclude with "was running" is that she indeed
"was running." And there is no implication that she
"completed" this running. And she certainly could have
been running BEFORE Yesterday as well. Like Forrest
Gump who ran for about a month straight without
stopping :o ) Forrest was running Tuesday, and
Wednesday, Yesterday, and still running today!
But, IF you require a DC to be the time of
writing/speech, then your system follows BY
DEFINITION, regardless of usage. No usage can
contradict your starting point, and all usages are
subsumed under the all-encompassing assumption. There
really is not need for further analysis. But, this
also applies to my assumption that DC's are literary
creations. (I am willing to entertain the notion that,
like in English, we write differently than we speak.
Here, Dr. Buth may very well disagree with me, but
I've never met a person who speaks the same way they
write. Is there something inherent in speech and
writing that results in two different modes of communicating?)
Eddie Mishoe
Pastor
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