Stephen Carlson wrote: ↑August 12th, 2021, 2:59 am
This is such a strange category to use in a Greek grammar (though textbooks may want to point it out).
This is an interesting and important point. I have handled it (PPA or whatever it is called) as a category. I have never thought if it should be handled as a category of the present tense. I agree it's a natural use of the present, nothing special. But still I think what has been noticed by grammarians is something real. Be it a grammatical-syntactic-semantic entity or complex or whatever. Maybe that's why I came to the conclusion that it doesn't make sense to talk about this phenomenon if there isn't an explicit time indicator. The present tense with such an indicator is something which is used for some purpose, the present tense alone isn't used for that purpose. The present tense in itself doesn't convey a time which continues from the past in that strict sense, i.e. it doesn't draw any attention to the time span or doesn't tell anything about it. Therefore this entity "stretches" the time of the present verb explicitly.
This can also create some discourse effects because the duration is added to the present. It's like underlining the event.
I took Wallace's description as problematic. Another problem (or a feature of his work which may raise some problems) is that his descriptions are meant for English speaking exegetes who need to translate a passage before doing the rest of the exegesis. In this case it leads to this:
The key to this usage is normally to translate the present tense as an English present perfect. Some examples might not fit such a gloss, however.
Why some examples don't fit? I have an explanation, and ironically this problem with English gloss can reveal something real in the Greek (or maybe some other language) use of the phenomenon. This is something I have considered in my essay. Thanks to these threads it becomes more and more tempting to publish it in some form, but I should find time to revisit it first. Our discussions here have given much new to think about.