[B-Greek] Verbal aspect and speaker's viewpoints
LuisCReyes at aol.com
LuisCReyes at aol.com
Sun Jul 8 20:50:26 EDT 2007
Dear Ken,
Thank you for your comments. It seems that you ran across what I also did
pertaining to Porter and Fanning’s notion of aspect as a conceptualized
subjective choice of the author. That is also what I had understood from their
definitions of aspect, and it seemed incorrect to me. To me linguistic aspect is a
semantic feature, but notions of conceptualized viewpoints are a matter of
pragmatics.
You mentioned:
“I think this is where we get statements to the effect that imperfective is ‘
looking at’ the event from inside, and perfective is looking at the event
from outside. The phrase ‘looking at’ refers to the relation of the reference
time to the event time. Once we begin speaking of ‘looking at’ an event, it
is a short step to calling this act of looking the author's ‘viewpoint.’ But
we are not really thinking psycholinguistically, or at least, if some
scholars are thinking of aspect in terms of psycholinguistics, they are not using
standard linguistic understandings of ‘aspect’."
Thank you very much for this clarification. This clarifies a greet deal, and
makes sense. This would mean that when writers such as Porter and Fanning
speak of “author’s viewpoints” that this only refers to the relation of the
reference time and the event time that is linguistically decoded and inferred
from the language the author used (a viewpoint according to what the language
says). Or as you mentioned a “viewpoint” that is derived from the “reference
point” of the surrounding encoded linguistic text. However, this brings to
light that their use of “author’s viewpoint” and “aspect” are confusing and
misleading (at least to me they are).
The confusing intermingling of linguistic “verbal aspect” with the “
pragmatic speaker’s actual viewpoint” has been one of my concerns with the
definitions given by Porter and Fanning. The concern is that exegetes would draw the
conclusion that proper decoding of linguistic aspect necessarily leads to the
author’s actual conceptualized viewpoint of the situation (it may or may not
but this is determined by pragmatics, not linguistics).
As far as I can tell, verbal aspect (let me call it linguistic verbal
aspect) as used by porter and Fanning, relies heavily on the code model of
communication (this is more apparent with Porter and his use of systemic
linguistics). From my understanding, the code model of communication falls extremely
short of representing how communication actually takes place (Sperber and
Wilson, Relevance, 1995, pp. 1-64), and this is due to the nature of linguistic
underdeterminacy in language altogether (Carston, Thoughts and Utterances,
2002). A linguist may view verbal aspect from what is linguistically encoded, and
that’s fine according to their research needs. However, the minute one
speaks about a conceptualized viewpoint of the author (whether subjective or not),
the situation now crosses into pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, or even
psycholinguistics, and theories of communication now come into play. The only
concern that I had with Olson’s work was that it relied heavily on the
legitimacy of Grice’s maxims (e.g., cooperative principle) and other notions of
implicautre (Olson, p. 17, 18). From my understanding, Gricecian pragmatics also
runs into some problems (Cf. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance), and this issue
will have a significant bearing on one’s perspective of pragmatics. However, I
don't remember if Olson made a necessary connection between linguistic verbal
aspect and an actual conceptualized speaker’s viewpoint.
At any rate, I think that popular notions of NT verbal aspect pertaining to
morphology encoding a so-called “speaker’s viewpoint” need to be corrected,
or clarified to say the least. I think what is also needed is for writers to
provide a clear distinction between linguistic/semantic verbal aspect and
notions of pragmatic “speaker’s viewpoints.”
God bless,
Luis C. Reyes
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