[B-Greek] Aorist and Imperfect: points of consensus
Rolf Furuli
furuli at online.no
Fri Sep 22 14:01:20 EDT 2006
Dear Randall,
While I see advantages with your approach regarding attested forms and
patterns and and predictions regarding what we may expect to find, I see two
great problems:
1) It is extremely difficult to interpret patterns on the basis of
statistics when we deal with tense and aspect at the same time. Tense and
aspect are two completely different entities, but they can in many cases
produce the same patterns. So, to know which do what will be a basic
problem.
2) Aspect is language-specific, and without the help of clearcut difinitions
of Greek
aspects (different from the traditional ones) before we review the thousands
of examples, our interpretations can be very wrong.
As an illustration of an approach to the Greek corpus different from yours,
I will give some data from the chapter in my dissertation where I ask: How
can we account for the real use of verbs in the Hebrew Bible if Hebrew has
just two conjugations ("tenses") and not four, as is universally believed?
In the Hebrew Bible there are several hundred of verses were different verb
forms of infinite verbs and finite verbs (corresponding to the Greek
"tenses") are used with exctly the same meaning (I discuss about 500 such
verses) . How can we account for this? There are also several hundred of
verses where one particular form ("tense") is needed. How can we account for
this? There are thre basic answers:
1) The two aspects are not mutually exclusive, but they have some common
characteristics and some different characteristics.
2) The requirement for precision varies. In some contexts particular details
are very important, and in others the broad picture is enough. In broad
situations both aspects can be used (their similarities are enough), in
specific situations only one aspect can be
used.
3) In a language there are linguistic conventiones, which make patterns. In
a tenseless language such conventions creates order in language use.
I use the basic tools "reference time, "event time," and "deictic center" to
find the characteristics of the aspects. The following table shows my
results regarding similarities and differences between the Hebrew aspects:
1. Both aspects make part of a situation visible.
2. The imperfective aspect makes details visible, but not so the perfective
one.
3. The imperfective aspect makes a small part visible, while the perfective
one makes a greater part visible.
4. The imperfective aspect can include either beginning or end; the
perfective aspect can include both beginning and end.
5. Both aspects can be bounded and unbounded.
6. The imperfective aspect can make visible a part before the beginning
(conative situations), and a part of a resultant state (resultative
situations), but no so the perfective aspect.
Different "tenses" with similar use: There are 470 verses in the Hebrew
Bible that occur two times almost verbatim. These have many variants, a
perfective verb in one verse, an imperfective one or an infinite form in the
corresponding verse (e.g. Psalm 18 and 2 Samuel 22). There are accounts of
one temporal setting but with perfective and imperfective forms having the
same temporal reference. (e.g. Proverbs 31:10-31), and there are states
(e.g. the borders of Israel, Joshua 15-19) where perfective and imperfective
verbs express exactly the same.
Situations where the imperfective aspect is required: a) Conative actions
(She tried to x.) b) Ingressive actions with the beginning included ("He
began to x). One event or state
intersected by another event (While David was reading in the scroll,
Jonathan entered the room.").
How will the results above affect the analysis of Greek verbs and the model
Randall suggests? Because tense evidently is a part of the classical Greek
verbal system, the use of verbs in Greek must be substantially more
restricted than in Hebrew where tense is lacking. And further, to come to
know the real nature of Greek
verbs must be much more complicated than in connection with Hebrew verbs,
where I, after I had shown that tense is not found in Hebrew, only had a
single factor to dela with, namely aspect. We cannot just analyse thousands
of Greek verbs before we have a scientific model by which we can find the
properties of a clause that are caused by tense and those that are cause by
aspect. To fail to distinguish between these must lead to an erroneous
analysis. In my view, the best approach is to start with the question: Which
Greek "tenses" express tense and which express only aspect? On the basis of
the answer to this question an analysis of thousands of verbs will yield
much better results.
An analysis of Greek verbs with the traditional metaphorical aspectual
definitions or definitions not based on scientific parameters will also
create poor results. List-members may disagree with my description of Hebrew
aspects, but this description, being it right or wrong, shows alt least two
things, 1) it is possible to analyse aspects by the help of fundamental
scientific parameters, and 2) it is possible to come up with completely
different definitions of aspects than the traditional ones. Just the
possibilities for this should trigger the curiousness of Greek students.
My conclusion is that quite a lot of basic research is necessary before we
can
start our analysis of thousands of Greek verbs. This is also necessary
before we can make any reasonable prediction as to which forms we can expect
to find in classical Greek. The claim regarding [aorist indicative]+AURION,
therefore, is a nonstarter. We cannot take one adverbial or another word and
say that if an aorist is not found together with this word, aorist is past
tense. If this combination is not found, it need not have any bearing on
tense, it simply can be a matter of linguistic convention. Perhaps, no
native speaker would find it naturally to use such a combination. We should
deal with what we find and not with what we do not find.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Randall Buth" <randallbuth at gmail.com>
To: "B-Greek at Lists. Org" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 8:39 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] Aorist and Imperfect: points of consensus
> 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
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
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