[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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