[B-Greek] Semantic Features and Rhetorical Use of the Greek Perfect

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 7 22:13:35 EST 2010


Thank you, Yancy, for this explanation.  I like your collapsed bridge
example.  In English this can mean two things, depending on the
context.  You could say "The bridge has collapsed.  It's going
to cost a lot of money to fix it."  Here the perfect points to the
present state resulting from a prior action.  But if I come into
a room and see you watching t.v. and you are upset, and I ask
"What happened?" and you turn to me and say "The bridge has
collapsed" you are not really saying anything about ongoing 
results.  You are talking about what just happened.  If you had
said "The bridge collapsed" it would not be very different in 
meaning.  But I get your point that the perfect, in both
English and Greek, because it has an extra syllable, may be
more "marked."  Zerwick talks about this in James 1:24
απεληλυθεν APELHLUQEN.  "He looks at himself, and,
check it out, here he is, going away and look, he forgets what
he's like."  He calls it a "dramatic perfect" or something
like that.  It just adds a little extra vividness.
 
I retract what I said earlier about EN SARKI ELHLUQOTA
in 1 John 4:2.  I don't think you can establish that John meant
to point to Jesus still being in the flesh.  I think the way you
describe the perfect here fits this passage.  It's just a little
more "marked," a little more vivid, a little more emphatic, a little more more. 
 
Thank you for explaining this linguistic concept in
very clear terms.  There is a first time for everything, I guess. 
 
<I am no linguist. Nor am I the son of a linguist.>
 
It took me a while, but I got this one.
 
Amos 7:14:  "Then Amos replied to Amaziah,
'I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a
prophet.  I am a herdsman and a grower of figs.'"
 Very nice. 

Mark L


FWSFOROS MARKOS

--- On Sun, 3/7/10, yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net <yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net> wrote:


From: yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net <yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: [B-Greek] Semantic Features and Rhetorical Use of the Greek Perfect
To: "B-Greek B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Sunday, March 7, 2010, 8:42 AM


I apologize to the list for what may have been meaningless linguistic speak in a recent post. I am no linguist. Nor am I the son of a linguist. I mentioned semantic potentials and a rhetorical use of the Greek perfect. My thesis is that the perfect tense is used in natural language in ways that have differing semantic weight, i. e.  variable semantic content. The biggies are:

1. past + recent completed action +present results/consequences- E.g. Mat 20:6 τί ὧδε ἑστήκατε ὅλην τὴν ἡμέραν ἀργοί; Or Mat 22:4 πάλιν ἀπέστειλεν ἄλλους δούλους λέγων· εἴπατε τοῖς κεκλημένοις· ἰδοὺ τὸ ἄριστόν μου ἡτοίμακα, οἱ ταῦροί μου καὶ τὰ σιτιστὰ τεθυμένα καὶ πάντα ἕτοιμα· δεῦτε εἰς τοὺς γάμους. 
2. present action-state: Mat 6:8 οἶδεν γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὧν χρείαν ἔχετε πρὸ τοῦ ὑμᾶς αἰτῆσαι αὐτόν.; Mat 12:47 εἶπεν δέ τις αὐτῷ· ἰδοὺ ἡ μήτηρ σου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί σου ἔξω ἑστήκασιν ζητοῦντές σοι λαλῆσαι

As is well known perfect tense is said to imply the completion of an action. Forgive my made-up Greek sentence: ‘συνπέπτηκεν ἡ γέφυρα’ "the bridge has collapsed" implies both something that happened rather recently and that it is still in a state of disrepair – a natural context would be in a sentence that continued ἀνάγκη οὐν ἡμῖν ἐστί περιπορεύεσθαι διὰ τὴν ὁδόν τὴν μακρότεραν  "so we will have to go the long way around’, i.e. stressing the present consequences. (This may be the way the Greek perfect was often used: to emphasize the present results/consequences of past actions.)   Cf. Mk 8:6 ὁ παῖς μου βέβληται ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ παραλυτικός, δεινῶς βασανιζόμενος.  

Now, in the NT we usually we find perfects in narrative material set in past time. Sometimes these perfects are indistinguishable from aorists, i.e. they do not realize certain semantic potentials. E.g. Mat 13:34 εὑρὼν δὲ ἕνα πολύτιμον μαργαρίτην ἀπελθὼν πέπρακεν πάντα ὅσα εἶχεν καὶ ἠγόρασεν αὐτόν.  Or, more than once, Mat 21:4 τοῦτο δὲ γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ τοῦ προφήτου

NT perfects are often in direct and indirect discourse. E.g.Matt 9:6 ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς στραφεὶς καὶ ἰδὼν αὐτὴν εἶπεν· θάρσει, θύγατερ· ἡ πίστις σου σέσωκέν σε. καὶ ἐσώθη ἡ γυνὴ ἀπὸ τῆς ὥρας ἐκείνης. 

The context of discourse within a narrative can do funny things to the perfect, depending on the type of discourse reported. As in this case, the statement is a performative (declaring something that by the declaration itself becomes so ipso facto, à la J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words).


Sometimes the only difference in meaning between the aorist and the perfect is that the perfect is used to contrast with the aorist for emphasis (also called markedness). Markedness can be achieved in various ways. For example: Mat. 25:6 μέσης δὲ νυκτὸς κραυγὴ γέγονεν· ἰδοὺ ὁ νυμφίος, ἐξέρχεσθε εἰς ἀπάντησιν [αὐτοῦ]. Think of it as something out of normal order or usage. It creates a demand on the reader/hearer to mentally process the difference, if even for a split second. If the the process of inferring meaning from context does result in the reader/hearer being able to add relevant extra meaning (+recent occurrence +present results), then the only relevant pay-off for the choice in using the perfect tense is to create a kind of vividness or emphasis, much like the "historic present." But of an speaker/author overuses the perfect in this way, it looses its markedness and
 becomes an alternate aorist or alternate present, whatever the case may be. I also wonder if the reduplicated stem is an extra phonemic element that sometimes the additional syllable may contribute to the sense of emphasis.

Of course there is also the perfect in formulaic statements like "it is written." There can be no semantic element  +recently complete action there, of course.

Yancy Smith, PhD
yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net
Y.W.Smith at tcu.edu
yancy at wbtc.com
5636 Wedgworth Road
Fort Worth, TX 76133
817-361-7565






---
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek



      


More information about the B-Greek mailing list