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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Mar 8 05:21:04 EST 2010


My response to this when originally originally posted yesterday never made it to the list.  Several have now had their say in response to Yancy's original post. I do think that discerning intended force of perfect-tense forms in Hellenistic Greek is tricky businesss, a matter not really reducible to some rule of thumb or simple chart. I continue to believe that aorist and perfect in Hellenistic Greek were in a process of coalescing, the perfect being used more frequently just like the aorist to indicate completed action while often enough clearly conveying a stative sense. Certainly the Hellenistic Greek perfect tense would appear to be the toughest nut to crack for the aspectologists. Greek users really had to know their verbs "up close and personal."

On Mar 7, 2010, at 10:42 AM, yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net wrote:
> 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.

Some interesting notes -- and in interesting allusion to the prophet of Tekoa, suggesting that when we say something serious about the use of language, we are "active" linguists. Is that "guilt" by association? I shudder to think (and I accuse nobody of anything in particular).

> The biggies are:
> 
> 1. past + recent completed action +present results/consequences- E.g. Mat 20:6 τί ὧδε ἑστήκατε ὅλην τὴν ἡμέραν ἀργοί;

I would have thought that the usage of hESTHKATE here is an instance of §2 below. OIDA and hESTHKA and their compounds are functional present-tense forms, as the pluperfects hEISTHKEIN and HiDEIN are functional imperfect-tense forms.

> 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. 

This is a nice example.

> 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.

This may or may not be the case. I confess to being a little skeptical about it. Steve Runge likes to throw in, at regular intervals, his axiom, "Choice implies difference." What I have never quite come to accept wholly is that we are always making a deliberate choice when we "choose" to say "six eggs" and "half a dozen eggs" or when we "choose" to refer to a jail as a "pokey" instead of calling it a "hoosegow."


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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