[B-Greek] Aorist and Imperfect: points of consensus

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Fri Sep 22 03:39:35 EDT 2006


I'll add a quesiton to the list.
How does a theory explain both what is attested and what is not
attested in ancient Greek? What do theories of aspect and tense in
ancient Greek have to say about attestation patterns. How do they
theorectically "predict" or "produce" such patterns?

Summary:
There was discussion on this issue, with some people claiming that
such a question was illegitimate for an ancient language while others
claimed that checking a theory against multi-million word databases is
no different than doing the same thing with a modern language.
(Multi-million word databases do exist for ancient Greek, though not
for Ugaritic.)
In any case, modern linguistics has a consensus on the legitimacy of
the question for testing any theoretical linguistic claim. And the
b-greek discussion did apply this to ancient Greek with the specific
question of how to explain the non-occurrence (or extreme rare
occurrence if found) of *[aorist indicative]+AURION in the same
clause. PS: this also holds true for the imperfect indicative.
*[imperfect ind.]+AURION in the same clause.
Claims differed. Some argued that this was evidence of tense being
included within the Greek aorist indicative. One proposal used a term
'remoteness' as an explanation, without explaning why "remote" items
were blocked by AURION 'tomorrow' without being blocked by eXQES
'yesterday.

Some explanation:
A good theory cannot just "explain" a limited corpus, it must somehow
constrain itself so that it would not also "accept" something
unacceptable (that is, that it would not include something within the
"explanation" as acceptable that was not acceptable). In modern
linguistics this is known as an overpowerful theory, a theory that
predicts things that are unacceptable. For example, to say that any
verb can be used with any verbal morphological process would
overpredict in English. *I goed to the store is not acceptable. the
theory needs constraint. Discussing and including the constraint
within the theory is mandatory for a good theory.

Caveat: the above was written by one of the participants of the discussion.

ERRWSQE
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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