[B-Greek] New book on Verbal Aspect

House mark at househouse.us
Mon Oct 27 08:36:55 EDT 2008


Buist Fanning, who published a definitive study on aspect in the early 
nineties, reviewed Campbell's book (the publication of his 2006 Macquarie 
doctoral dissertation under Trevor Evans) for the June edition of JETS. 
While he finds it to be a "valuable monograph" with "helpful insights," the 
review focuses on its shortcomings, which include an inadequate explanation 
of the aspectual function of presents vs. aorists in verbs introducing 
speech, his conclusion (along with Porter) that tenses do not grammaticalize 
time, and his tendency to distort others' views while failing to address 
weaknesses in his own. Fanning finds some value in Campbell's reconstruction 
of the perfect/pluperfect as functioning to "encode imperfective aspect 
along with heightened proximity [perfect] or heightened remoteness 
[pluperfect]," but also finds that the definition produces "odd readings" in 
several NT texts, including the many instances of OIDA. He views Campbell's 
dismissal of the stative understanding of the perfect (against Fanning, 
McKay, and Porter) as cavalier, based on unsympathetic reading of how others 
have explained the functioning of transitive perfects. At the very least, 
Campbell's monograph demonstrates that the discussion of this relatively new 
field is far from over.

Mark House


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Oun Kwon" <kwonbbl at gmail.com>
To: "B Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 10:47 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] New book on Verbal Aspect


> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 5:41 PM, James Spinti <JSpinti at eisenbrauns.com> 
> wrote:
>> Listers might find this book of interest. It just came today as a
>> supplement to the Zondervan regular catalog, and I can't even find it on
>> Zondervan's website yet:
>>
>> Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek
>> by Constantine R. Campbell
>> Zondervan Publishing Company, Forthcoming November 2008
>> 176 pages, paper.
>> List Price: $16.99
>>
>> Details here:
>> http://www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~CAMBASICS
>>
>> A quick search on Constantine Campbell shows two previous monographs on
>> verbal aspect from Peter Lang, one in 2007 on indicative verbs, and one
>> in 2008 on non-indicative verbs.
>>
>> I requested more info from Zondervan and will post more once I know
>> more.
>>
>> James
>>
>
>
> Almost 3 months after I placed an order, I just received a copy of
> this book. Written for non-scholar by a scholar. Thank you for the
> book. Now I am going to get into Aktion for Aspect.
>
> Oun.
>
> 




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