[B-Greek] BMCR review of Rijksbaron's Verbal Syntax book - linguistic terminology
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Feb 19 08:27:16 EST 2008
Thank you, Carl, for the reference to the review.
On terminology, I suppose that 'event' might be more transparent
than 'state of affairs', but Rijksbaron does define the term and
he is at least being consistent with the linguistic model that
he follows (Functional Grammar).
(from the june 2007 posting referenced by Carl)
>To be sure
it is Attic Greek that is being discussed here, but it seems to me
that it should be of considerable value to students of NT Koine in
illuminating verb usage.>
One could add that all of it was still applicable in the first century,
especially when one includes writers like Luke, Josephus, and
Plutarch. I would recommend this as an important supplement
to Blass-Debrunner-Funk for NT students.
In general, Rijksbaron's head is screwed on straight and he
generally gets straight to the point without a long theoretical
digression that would confuse rather than elucidate. His voice
carefully distinguishes kinds of 'subjects' used with kinds of
verbs. He does not use the term 'deponent', though he does
discuss classes of verbs that are middle-only, passive-only,
or active-only.
On the perennial question of 'tense-aspect' he inconsistently
calls the stems 'tenses' while pointing out that infinitives and
imperatives are pure aspects. At the same time he saves a
lot of ink by discussing the 'pure aspect' view of indicatives
in a footnote (p. 2) and calling the view "untenable". He
favorably quotes Fanning on a different point and does not
list Porter in the select bibliography. The Greeks themselves
were 'guilty' of the 'tense' name of the stems, though they
may be excused if their name ENESTWS be
given an aspectual exegesis with non-indicatives, that is,
a 'standing-in-the-midst [not seeing the ends]' category
of various mood forms, an ENESTWSA view.
We use PARATATIKH 'extending
[not seeing the end]' for such non-indicatives in our summer
SXOLH, (www.biblicalulpan.org) as did the Greeks for the
indicative past PARATATIKOS 'extending time [past
imperfective]'.
The BMCR reviewer himself Coulter George
(http://apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/08mtg/abstracts/george.pdf)
has a nice note on the historic present that highlights its
incongruous aspect, that is, the present tense is inherently
imperfective, yet when used as a historic present it functions
aoristically. The reviewer attributes that to a historical
development beyond Homer where time was playing a more
dominant role in Greek and aspect was able to be tweeked
as in the 'historic present.'
Finally, one can add that there is a nice summary of Rijk.'s
functions on pp 199-214. I also appreciate his grouping of
conditional clauses by Greek structures rather than an
arbitrary number system (aka. 'first-class, ... fourth class)
that no Greek would follow and that no one using the
language would think of while speaking or listening.
Last but not least, it would have been
nice to see Greek terminology used where it exists. That is
one item that I was happy to see last week in Roger Bacon
(grammarian from 1200's).
ERRWSQE
IWANHS
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
randallbuth at gmail.com
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