[B-Greek] recommendations on Greek verb books

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon Apr 6 16:20:29 EDT 2009


mitch egrapse
>You wrote:

>> "In other words, the historic
present is a pragmatic playing with the aspectual value of the present
tense. It describes a state of affairs "as if" it were open-ended,
while in context it is in a series of events where it is an
'indivisible whole'. In literary terms, the historic present is a
rhetorical playing with aspect just as much as it is a rhetorical
playing with time. It is wrong for 'aspect-only' people to point to
the historic present, claim that it occurs in a past context and then
claim that the Greek present tense cannot logically have time in its
semantics.">>

>If the idea was to borrow the aspectual value of the Present (Imperfective aspect) Tense in a place where one would have expected an Aorist (Perfective aspect) Tense, why would the Greeks not have used the Imperfect (Imperfective aspect) Tense in order to retain the same temporal climate as the (historical/past time) context? They had an Imperfect Tense (Imperfective aspect) set of verbs readily available for use.>

Good question. As already mentioned, the idea was not to borrow only
the aspect of the present tense, but that TIME was included in the
rhetorical/pragmatic presenatation. And the Greeks did both, they used
the imperfect rhetorically/pragmatically and they used the present
rhetorically/pragamtically.

1. They sometimes used the imperfect tense (PARATATIKOS XRONOS)
'against the grain' in order to background an event, to pragmatically
diminish its prominence in the skeleton of the story and make it
supportive to the aorist events.
2. They also sometimes used the present tense (ENESTWS XRONOS)
'against the grain', where they get the Time and the aspect together
to play a pragmatic role. It is often backgrounded in terms of the
skeleton of events, often portraying introductory and supportive
material, but at the same time it raises expectancy by being present
tense, it points out things that are going to develop. Rijksbaron
summarizes this as 'decisive states of affairs'. He also talks about
the historic present breaking up a narrative into units (7.2),
something that I wrote up in a little paper on Mark over thirty years
ago.  Rijksbaron adds a third occasional function as a
pseudo-eyewitness effect.

ERRWSO
Randall Buth

--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



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