[B-Greek] atelic histrocal present

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Thu Apr 9 16:27:34 EDT 2009


On Apr 9, 2009, at 12:38 PM, Randall Buth wrote:

> The first thing we need is a historical context for a historic  
> present.
> Then we need to examine the historic presents. a ggod place to start  
> would be
> Mark, where we have lists available in various publications. Is  
> ESTIN ever used
> as such? EXEI,?
> On the other hand, I do not know that his distinction will hold.  
> What I do know
> is that the historic presents occur in sequences that are typically  
> sequential and
> would have most simply been encoded as aorist, like "X comes and  
> did" where
> the coming had to be complete in order to do the 'did'. thus, the  
> choice of aspect
> as well as tense is for more than semantically meshing events in a  
> story but is
> for rhetorical, pragmatic effect.

Well it seems to hold for all the historical presents mentioned in G.  
Cooper, I checked almost every verb and could not find single verb  
that was unambiguously atelic. There are grey areas, like KAQISW which  
is typically telic but sometimes represents a state of affairs. I  
checked the one or two of these from Cooper's list and they were telic.


Elizabeth Kline







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