Search Results for: Aubrey perfect

Aubrey on the Middle Voice (2)

May 21, 2020 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , ,

Carrying on with our read-through of Rachel Aubrey’s thesis on the Greek middle. Part 1 here. Numbers in brackets are page references.

The rest of chapter 1 provides an overview of approaches to the middle. Aubrey commences this by highlighting two issues – (i) the semantic basis of the middle is unclear, (ii) its “formal expression is uncertain” (5). Traditionally (6) voice is treated “as a relationship between subject and verb” (6).

Active: the subject does the action as agent.

Passive: the subject suffers the action, as patient.

Middle: ???

The middle shows such a diversity of semantic relationships that it is difficult to summarise it. It is also often treated as equivalent to a reflexive. However that tends to belie an important distinction – the middle typically occurs with things that are customarily done by people on themselves (hence the ‘bodily grooming’ verbs), the reflexive structure (e.g. ἑαυτόν) involves both active and middle verbs, that are not customarily done to oneself. Other categories of middle-type verbs fit even less well in the ‘reflexive’ notion (9). Aubrey goes on to work through a number of other different categories or types of action generally found or treated as middle, which traditional schemes have tried to abstract as a single overall ‘middleness’ : “self-interest, personal involvement, participation, special focus, or subject-affectedness” (10). She notes that the problem with all these is that they are so abstracted that they fail to capture the variety of middle functions, as well as how the middle relates to voice alternations.

The second challenge has to do with “the formal expression of the middle”, especially morphosyntax. For example, the existence of active-only verbs that lack middle-passive forms, as well as middle-only verbs that lack active forms. Similarly, the existence of the -(θ)η- middle-passive perfectives. Traditionally, this means that imperfective (‘present’, ‘imperfect’) forms are presented as an opposition between active and middle-passive, and perfective (‘aorist’, ‘future’) as a tripartive alternation between active, middle, passive. But perfective -θη- often does not conform to expectations that it is properly passive semantically (13).

Aubrey’s interest is bringing the analysis around to transitivity. These two things (voice, transitivity) have not traditionally been treated together, voice being a relation of subject and verb, transitivity of verb and object. Voice, Aubrey says, “entails distinctions in process, regarding how an event transpires” (14). By considering event structure – how an event is understood to unfold, voice distinctions allow us to view, and portray, an event unfolding in different ways.

In particular, a semantic approach allows us to consider three parameters (drawing on Shibatani):

  • how events unfold in the flow of energy: how they begin, progress, and end
  • how participants are related within event development
  • how their involvement affects the relative salience of participants (15)

What does that mean? In short, we consider where, how and whom events start, and end. We consider the roles that various participants take in the event. The middle re-orients out understanding and placement of the subject, in a way that differs from the active.

Aubrey’s approach to transitivity more generally, then, treats it as a continuum, from a prototypical transitive event “where a volitional agent purposely acts on a distinct patient, causing a physical change of state/location in the patient” (18). The middle is a voice alternation that departs from that presentation. It may depart from it in various ways though. Generally though, the origin and endpoint role of a middle event is filled by the same participant (19).

Aubrey summarises, or subsumes, the three parameters (above) into two motivations for how we portray events (and thus choose to use or not use middle forms): energy flow (a and b above), and focus of attention (c above) (20). This also deals with, or subsumes, ‘subject-affectedness’, by also treating a participant as more or less affected by the event, and their nature as an endpoint.

Thus Aubrey’s treatment is to view “the middle as a multifunctional category grounded in human cognition” and this “allos us to engage the construal process and the nature of event categorization” (21).

In our next post, we’ll look at chapter 2, which considers the Greek middle into a cross-linguistic typology context.

Aubrey on the Middle Voice (1)

April 18, 2020 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , ,

This is a series of posts blogging my way through the very recent MA thesis of Rachel Aubrey on ‘HELLENISTIC GREEK MIDDLE VOICE: SEMANTIC EVENT STRUCTURE AND VOICE TYPOLOGY’ available here. I’m not a linguist, but I do my best to help non-linguists understand linguistic content. In this post I cover only the very first introductory section.

Aubrey’s introduction neatly highlights the problematic approaches to the middle voice in Greek (the thesis focuses on Hellenistic Greek, understandably, and I will shorten this to ‘Greek’ throughout except where other periodisations are required). Primarily, the middle voice is ‘multifunctional’ (1) and so resists attempts at ‘simple generalizations’ (1). In particular, standard approaches in traditional NT Greek grammars are rooted in a classical (and grammarian) tradition (not a linguistic one). Two problems in particular stand out: portraying the middle in terms of an active-passive dichotomy, and focusing on morphosyntax as a descriptive (and even diagnostic) framework.

The consequences of such an approach, Aubrey writes, are a neglect of a typological approach; an oversimplification of middle semantics, either by (a) discretely compartmentalising usages, or (b) too simplistic generalisations). The outcome of these consequences, in turn, is a dual failure of NT Greek grammars in both typology and paradigm.

Aubrey’s approach (2) is (a) typological, (b) contrasts active-middle counterparts, (c) uses ‘semantic transitivity’ as a lens to understanding.

What’s semantic transitivity? At least so far as I understand it, the analysis is going to consider transitivity as a ‘scale’, rather than the binary that English oriented grammar often works with (transitive vs intransitive), so that we are considering transitivity as a spectrum of ‘action directed upon an entity’. In particular, we are interested in transitivity as encoded in the meaning of verbs, and the presentation of event types, rather than the morphosyntax per se.

Aubrey then moves on in the introduction to outline the thesis structure itself. That is, a review of current approach to the Greek middle (chapter 1), language typological considerations (chapter 2), a diachronic perspective (chapter 3), before presenting her own unified approach (chapter 4).

She also highlights in the introduction some of the benefits of this work. In particular, a much better framework for putting to rest (6 foot under), the notion of deponency, but also providing a language-specific account which handles the idiosyncrasies of the middle voice, in a way that reflects languages with middle voices, not the framework of an active-passive voice language.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to reading this thesis in depth. Having read both Kemmer and Allen’s work on the middle voice, and having heard enough hints about Aubrey’s thesis, I strongly expect this to be the newest and hottest treatment of the middle voice in Greek, and if widely read, set to reshape the way we understand, and teach, voice in (Hellenistic, at least), Greek.

 

 

(You can find some of my previous posts and treatment of the middle voice here, as well as my read through of Michael Aubrey’s thesis on the Greek perfect form here.)

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (6)

February 12, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , , , ,

Chapter 5 of Aubrey’s thesis returns to the stratosphere, as he takes the analysis done on the perfect in Koine Greek and then considers what this has to say/contribute to how RRG works as an approach for linguistics. Particularly, he wants to consider how the Bybee-Dahl approach of look at grams without prejudging meta-categories of aspect/tense/mood, can mesh with Bhat’s typology of looking at languages in terms of A/T/M prominence. An initial diagrammatic relaisation of that is given on p138. This realisation itself has problems, in that it is an idealisation. A more concrete, though still rather abstract, diagram of Koine Greek comes on p140.

p141 offers a diagram that goes back to typology of verbal operators in RRG. Can the approach to categories presented in Aubrey’s synthesis of Bybee-Dahl-Bhat be realised within this typology? Aubrey says perhaps not, and perhaps it’s not necessary anyway.

If you’re after some key pay-off for understanding Greek, p143 has some good material. Aubrey says that the perfect, like the future, is a peripheral category, and that as such they “are not inherently tense or aspect”. As far as this analysis goes, the perfect functions within the aspect system, because Greek is aspect prominent. The future appears ambiguous, because it almost doesn’t know whether it’s aspectual or temporal.

Chapter 6 is the Conclusion chapter, and if you’ve been lost, here is a chance to catch up. I’d like to emphasise the first sentence here, “The goal of this thesis was not so much to solve a problem, but to fill in a gap.” (p145) Aubrey’s thesis doesn’t ‘solve’ the Greek perfect, it seeks to expand the usefulness of RRG for certain areas of language description. But obviously this thesis has important implications for understanding Koine Greek. Indeed, note the sentence on p150 under “Possibilities for future research”, where he says, “If we evaluate the grammars of the past century in terms of Chomsky’s types of linguistic adequacy, they fail to even meet the standard of descriptive adequacy, much less explanatory adequacy.” ouch.

I won’t offer a read-through of the two appendices. Appendix A lists of all the verbs examined and their predicate classes. It is worth reading, because of the way it helps you understand that typology of predicate classes and how it relates to actual verbs and the actual research Aubrey has done.

Appendix B is probably of more interest to my general (minute) readership. It is an overview of the Greek verbal system. Why do you need to read this? Because probably all you have read is those inadequate grammars we mentioned above! The overview here is “independent of the traditional grammatical tradition in terms of categories and terminology” (p187) and so well worth your reading.

 

And that’s a wrap. Take home message: Greek perfects are resultative/completive grams operating in the aspect system. Or, to uncover Aubrey’s view of aspect from Appendix B (p199):

The Koine Greek verbal system has three aspects: perfective, imperfective, and perfect. The perfective aspect makes no reference to internal temporal structure and is contextually bounded in its interpretation. The imperfective refers to temporal internal structure that is incomplete. It is contextually unbounded. If it appears in a clause with a goal periphery, there is nothing to suggest the goal was achieved. Lastly the perfect aspect refers to internal temporal structure that is either completed (completive) or exists as achieved state (resultative). It is inherently telic and will either assign an endpoint to a situation or event or denote the resultant state of that situation or event. As such, the perfect is both telic and bounded.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (5)

February 10, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , , , ,

Apologies that these come out slowly, I am mostly busy trying to get a paper written by month’s end. Here are links to the earlier posts: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Today we’re picking up at 4.2.3, which deals with “Gram-specific tests part II: Predicate classes”. Probably you’ve had a mental blank and have no idea what Aubrey is talking about. Basically what Aubrey does in this section is take the idea of “anteriors” (indicating a thing that happened prior to another thing, “resultatives” (indicating that an action with a goal (a telic predicate) has created a new state (result), and “completives” (indicating that an action has, you guessed it, come to its inherent end point).

In this section Aubrey goes through Greek perfects and looks at how they match up with these gram types: First he looks at State Predicates (verbs that indicate a state of being); he finds that generally they do not appear in the perfect. The main contrast he does find is Type IV grammatical contrasts (i.e. the difference in forms means that the event is conceptualised differently). In which the perfect indicates entrance into the state. he also finds some involve an “intensive usage” indicating that the participant “experience[es] the state to the highest degree” (p99). Verbs with a meaning of strong emotion are also found in the perfect with such an intensive sense. Generally speaking, these findings correlated with resultative and completive ideas.

The other set of atelic predicates (semelfactives and activity), are easier to talk about. Semelfactives basically do not appear in the perfect. Activity predicates generally only appear in the perfect as active achievements with an endpoint. I.e. you don’t get “marched” in the perfect, but you do get “marched to the city”. This is followed by some stuff about negative clauses which we will skip today.

The next section (4.2.3.2) deals with telic predicates. i.e. verbs which involve or end with a change of state. Following the RRG typology, Aubrey looks through achievements, active achievements, and accomplishments. If you forgot what those are, you can revise them in my first post in this series.

Active achievements involve an activity that has a duration, and then a change fo state (the achievement) that is instantaneous. You find Greek perfects with this idea. You do not find Greek perfects (usually) with Activity predicates (the activity with a duration, but no change of state at the end of it).

I walked or I was walking are activities.

I walked to the park is an active achievement.

Aubrey finds that only when an activity is given a specific (object) or end point is it likely to appear in the perfect rather than the perfective. He also finds the perfect used for “exhaustive” completion of an activity, and in conjunction with voice that the perfect middle is used “to refer to the achieved state of an active achievement”, a role the imperfective middle will not do.

Overall this section also supports the idea that resultatives and completives are dominant in comparison to anteriors.

Aubrey then goes on to look at achievements and accomplishments. This too supports the above conclusion. Finally this chapter looks at causatives along the same lines.

I have skimmed over a lot of examples and argumentation in this chapter to basically give an overview of what is discussed and what is found. In the conclusion of this chapter, Aubrey affirms that the Greek perfect is not anterior but is split between resultatives and completives. His tests have some relevance for adjusting the tests themselves, and how this typology may fit with RRG as well.

What does this mean for how you understand the perfect in Greek?

“In sum, the Greek perfect is a synthetic verbal morpheme that patterns with other aspect morphemes and thus functions in the nuclear layer of the operator projection. Semantically, the morpheme conveys both resultative and completive meaning, depending on both the predicate being used and also the context of the predication. On many occasions, particularly with perfects derived from accomplishments and achievements, it is almost impossible to choose between resultative and completive readings.” (p131).

 

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (4)

February 2, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

Okay, if you’re coming at this from a Koine Greek angle like me, we’re now getting to the good stuff. In chapter 4 Aubrey takes his methodological work and begins to apply it specifically to the Greek perfect. Firstly, he reviews some of the disagreements about the perfect, and this is actually really helpful to. For example, he talks about the Perfect as historically a derivation of a PIE stative verb that is generally agreed in the Homeric period to be a resultative type gram. There is less agreement about the shift into Classical Greek, with most agreeing that it came to be a kind of anterior gram, but little consensus about when this took place, McKay puts it as late as Byzantine Greek! As for the Koine period, there’s no consensus at all. Fanning sees it as a state-predicate, Porter treats it as stative but then goes out on a limb and says that stativity is its own aspect. Evans and Campbell are the most extreme, claiming that it is in fact imperfective in aspect. What’s a poor Greek scholar to do!

Well, Aubrey says let’s go ahead and apply the methodology and tests previsouly outlined. p83 has a useful table that talks about Greek morphemes in a way maybe you hadn’t thought about before. Put the root in the middle: λυ, now what can come immediately after that? 3 options: nothing, σ, or κ, so this is a 3-way contrast between imperfective, perfective, and perfect. Note that the aorist and the future are marked by sigma for perfective aspect. Immediately before the root there is a slot for reduplication, and then further ‘out’ the front you have the tense marker (the ε augment), while on the end slot you have “everything else”. If you’re reading Aubrey’s thesis with me, the table really makes this clear.

Anyway, what’s the upshot? Perfect marking goes next to the root, and in an aspect slot. You can’t mark perfect and also mark perfective or imperfective. You can mark perfect and then mark past time. So this supports both aspect prominence for Greek, and aspect for understanding the perfect.

Moving on to grammaticalisation, paradigmaticity, obligatoriness, and pervasiveness (remember those long words!), aspect is more pervasive (p84) because aspect is marked in both indicative and non-indicate forms; tense is only marked in the indicative.

The next step is to test the perfect with quantification. We talked about this back in my second post, and it’s around page 50 or so of the thesis. Basically, we want to see whether the perfect takes certain types of adverbs and not others. Cardinal counting (once, twice, thrice) should occur with perfectives, frequency counting (always, twice a day, five times a year, etc..) should occur with imperfectives. You probably need to read this section (p85-88) to get a full scope of it. Aubrey talks about how the different types of quantifier adverbs appear with different semantic types of perfects (resultatives, completives, anteriors), and talks about how ἀεὶ appears to function with perfects to indicate persistence rather than frequency. Anyway, the conclusion is that this test too confirms that the perfect should be understood primarily in aspectual terms.

The next metatest (p89-91) looks at discourse function, with a passage from Josephus. The conclusion is that the perfect do not provide mainline information that moves the narrative forward, which is what the perfective aspect does. It provides background information. This does not mean, as Campbell concluded, that the perfect is in fact imperfective though. “They both do convey temporal internal structure (Comrie 1976), but the type of temporal internal structure is distinct. The imperfective has no inherent endpoint, while the perfect at times places the focus on the completion of a backgrounded event and other times presents an event as a persistent state that existed concurrently with the foregrounded narrative” (p92).

The next section looks at gram-specific tests (anteriors, resultatives, and completives). In this post I round out the shorter section, looking at adverb tests, and leave the second half of chapter 4 for the next post. Specifically, we should expect adverbs such as “just” and “already” with anteriors, and “still” with resultatives. The conclusion is somewhat inconclusive, because the data splits. But what Aubrey does claim is that the Greek perfect allows for resultative-like grams. However the adverb test does not help us with completives, so the status of completives and anteriors requires further testing. Which we shall see in the second half of chapter 4.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (3)

January 27, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , , , ,

Are you having fun yet? You can read parts 1 and 2 first.

Today we pick up at section 3.2.1, in which Aubrey talks about 2 approaches to categorising up how the perfect ‘fits in’ to languages. But I’m going to flip things up a bit by talking about the second approach (3.2.1.2) first. The second approach Aubrey discusses is by Bhat, who suggests an idealised model in which languages give more prominence to either aspect, tense, or mood. So imagine there are these 3 ‘ideal’ (almost Platonic) languages, one which privileges Aspect above all else, the other raises Tense to the same degree, the third treats Mood with this importance. Each actual language doesn’t match on of these ideals, but it will triangulate and lean towards one of these more than the others.

How do you know which element is more prominent? Features like: grammaticalisation (i.e. is the element embedded into the grammar of the language?), obligation (i.e. are speakers given no choice about whether to express the element or not. e.g. in some languages one must indicate whether something is perfective or imperfective in aspect, there is no non-aspect-marked form), systematic and pervasive (i.e. is the element featured throughout the language’s [verbal] system without significant gaps).

So a language that forces and features past vs. non-past may be tense prominent, a language that obliges perfective vs. imperfective is more likely to be aspect prominent, etc..

Aubrey discusses this model second for certain reasons, that Bhat manages to encapsulate ideas from Bybee-Dahl in a way useful for RRG. But in my view Bhat is a lot easier to understand than Bybee-Dhal and thus to explain. Bhat also (p59-60) suggests that some elements may be ‘re-explained’ within an language from one type of system to another. This can be seen in the Future. Is the future ‘tense’ modal (expressing ideas like desire, obligation, ability) or temporal in its operation? This differs from language to language, but it also differs diachronically, and this is certainly true for Ancient Greek. Some have analysed the future as deriving from a PIE desiderative suffix (p61), while offers argue that it derives from a perfective aspect suffix. So, the question then becomes, ‘Historically, did the future tense-form arise from a modal form or an aspect one?’ Regardless, with reference to Dionysius Thrax, Aubrey points out that Ancient Greek grammarians analysed it as aspectual.

Similarly with the perfect. For tense-prominent languages (still p61), perfects can be analysed temporally, a “past even that has current (present) relevance” (quoting Bhat). This certainly works quite well for English. On the other hand (p63) an aspect-prominent language has a perfect form that is aspectual, not temporal, in both its formation and its general significance.

Okay, now that we’ve got our heads around Bhat, let’s step back to 3.2.1.1, Bybee-Dahl. These two sideline categories like tense and aspect, and instead look at “grams”. What are “grams”? Imagine you just came up with a word that signified varies tense-forms or aspect-forms or mood-forms, but you wanted it not to mean any of them in particular, just all those varieties of putting a verb into a particular ‘form’. That’s a gram (I think!), or a “grammatical morpheme” – it’s a tag or structure that identifies a particular grammatical feature, but remember we’re dealing with verbal systems. So it’s when we analyse these grams that we go looking for their tense/aspect/mood in relation to their semantic content.

This frees us to look at grams more broadly, and consider how a range of notions: aspectual, temporal, modal, aktionsart-ish, and so on, can or could be realised in a language’s systems. There’s a great, difficult to summarise, illustrative diagram on p55.

One of the advantages of this model is that it sidesteps ‘beginning’ with the Perfect. instead, they present ‘gram-types’ such as “resultatives, completives, and anteriors” which have “similar paths of grammaticalization” that typically result in “perfect” forms. But it allows both synchronic and diachronic analysis of what that perfect means, its semiosis.

By dispensing with the tense-aspect-mood categories as a starting point, it allows a better approach to the individual systematisation of languages, however the disadvantages are a lack of engagement with some other linguistic theoretical elements (p57) such as that grammaticalisation of tense is usually distinct from grammaticalisation of aspect as a system. The failure is largely a result of tending to look at things from a more micro rather than macro perspective.

So Aubrey moves on in 3.2.2 to talk about how using these approaches, we must discuss mortphosyntactic and semantic tests (p64). How does the perfect line up with tense grams and aspect grams? How do we categorise actual grams in a particular language? We need some tests! Tests for grammatical prominence are something I talked a little bit earlier in this post: grammaticalisation, systematic organisation, obligatoriness, pervasiveness. The second step to is test for tense and aspect in particular. We must consider whether a particular gram functions within the paradigm of the tense system or aspect system, unambiguously or not. In some languages tense/aspect is always ambiguous, or better yet intertwined.

Aubrey talks through a number of other types of tests, which are summarised in a table on p70. Finally he talks about tests suitable for perfect-like grams (p71), which is the focus of the study. Bybee et alii set out two morphosyntactic tests for anterior and reultative grams: anteriors will take temporal adverbs likejust or already, but not still (prior state-of-affairs vs. persistent situation). Anterior grams are likely to be tense-oriented.

Resultative grams function in reverse: they should take still but not just and already, and resultatives are aspect-oriented. Sadly, Aubrey notes, Bybee et alii don’t have any more good tests for these 3 grams. Instead, some test need to be derived. Resultatives, by their semantic content, “require a normally telic verb”, so there’s a test waiting to happen. Completive grams tend to “correlate closely with change of state predicates”; these, and a few others, result in 7 tests (p74) for Aubrey to apply to perfect-like grams in Greek.

Great! In our next post we’ll get to work on understanding how Aubrey went with applying this to the Greek perfect

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (2)

January 24, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , , , ,

For part 1 click here.

Today I’m going to talk my way through Chapter 3 of Aubrey’s thesis. What did Aubrey do in Chapter 2? He told you all about Role and Reference Grammar and then said, “hey, why doesn’t it do a good typology/classification of tense and aspect? Wouldn’t that be handy-dandy?” Chapter 3 sketches out what an approach to tense and aspect in RRG would/could/should look like.

Aubrey starts off by talking about some of the meta-issues; for example how categories relate to a particular language and to universal grammar, or at least a universalising concept of language (p29). Similarly, simply choosing what terminology to use, what distinctions or categories to draw up, is itself a step of interpretation, before we even get to the empirical questions (p30). There is, almost inevitably, a back and forth between the more theoretical and the more ‘on the ground’ levels of analysis here (p31). This issue of the “bidirectional relationship between” the two levels, quoting Bache, then gets applied to Porter’s analysis by way of critique. Porter introduces the label ‘remote’ to refere to the past/non-past distinction in Greek. But this choice of label, and especially how Porter uses it, do not match with more generalised applications of the term in linguistics. That is, remoteness is generally used to refer to temporal remoteness in languages, to temporal distance. But Porter repurposes the term to use it precisely for non-temporal remoteness that may be used temporally. This is idiosyncratic at best.

In the following section Aubrey considers a very interesting element of methodology. It has to do with example sentences, replacement, and minimal pairs. A typical way of teasing out linguistic differences is to use example sentences, and change a single element, to demonstrate the difference this makes in utterance. Drawing on Bache, Aubrey gives us a typology of 4 types: (I) Replacement is not possible due to a gap in the grammar, (II) replacement results in an ungrammatical sentence, (III) replacement results in a distinct change of meaning (non-synonymy), (IV) replacement involves slight to zero change of meaning (near synonymy). Aubrey runs through examples, with reference to English and to Koine, and demonstrates how all 4 categories need to be examined for linguistic typology, but also how the boundaries of these types are sometimes unclear. Further on (p.45f) he points out that generally Type II and III are the categories that best demonstrate claims about “morphological and syntactic forms”, but a responsible use of example sentences will be one that considers what type of contrast is in play, not merely what contrast is set up.

Careful attention to this typology of contrast sentences is important because misplaced emphasis on the wrong categories can lead to unjustifiable claims. This is seen in the Koine tense/aspect debates from the late 80s (p.47). Undue emphasis on type 4 contrasts supported claims that Greek was tenseless, whereas alternate understandings of the contrast pairs would support a different explanation that saw these as extensional differences. What’s the upshot at this point of Aubrey’s argument? That Porter argued for something on the basis of Type IV examples, when he should have given more argument on the basis of Types II and III, and that this undermines the strength of Porter’s analysis and conclusion.

Now Aubrey moves on (p.50) to a select examination of work on typology of tense and aspect. Here’s some real meat for you. First up, Comrie’s “definition of aspect as involving the grammaticalization of the ‘internal temporal constituency,’ of a situation” (p.51), then Bhat’s 3 classes: (1) perfective vs. imperfective, (2) phasal (distinctions of temporal constituency: e.g. ingressive, resultative, progressive, etc., (3) quantificational (distinctions of countability).

Almost everyone who has heard about aspect in Greek is familiar with the first distinction here. The second is a set of terms that many will be familiar with, and generally in Greek assign as ‘usages’, or ‘senses’ of particular verbs in context (so-called “ingressive imperfect” for instance). The third similarly so, “habitual present”, “iterative imperfect”). This has really just been a way for typological Intermediate grammars to explain/classify usages of Greek tense-forms that don’t match grammar-translationists default glosses.

This 3rd category of Bhat’s is also “difficult…in descriptive practice”. Languages just don’t neatly have/define/contrast their aspectual markings along lines that one would like.

When it comes to tense, things are more simply (p53), I mean you can only really have three deictic tense references: past, present, future, in relation to the point of speech. Any variation on this is only going to do one of two things: mark degrees of temporal remoteness from the point of speech, or using non-deictic reference, e.g. indicating past/present/future from a different point of time. Of course, one can combing deictic and non-deictic reference systems, to indicate combinations of temporal reference in relation to both time of speech, time of event, time of relative event, etc..

I’m going to stop here for today. In the next half of chapter 3 Aubrey goes on to talk about typology and the Perfect more specifically.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (1)

January 19, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve started reading Mike Aubrey’s masters thesis, which I suggest you do too. To get the statement of bias out of the way, I have vague sympathetic feelings towards Aubrey based entirely on internet interactions, and recommend his updated-just-enough-to-keep-you-subscribed blog. Apart from that I have no vested interest in talking him up.

Why should you read his masters thesis? 1. It’s about Greek. 2. It applies linguistics, not just grrrammmar (I didn’t mean to write it like that, but my keyboard spat it out thus and I thought it worth keeping!), 3. It’s about the perfect, kind of. And everyone loves to talk about the perfect these days. 4. If nothing else, by the end of it you will have absorbed so much technical jargon that you will be able to bamboozle your interlocutors into silence on any topic, especially unrelated ones.

You should know, too, that I am not formally trained in linguistics. Studying 5.5 languages and having a perverse interest in the field turned me into a paralinguist, and leeching off my wife’s textbooks while she did an MA in applied linguistics have given me all the hubris of someone who thinks they know linguistics but probably would fail the intro course.

What’s Aubrey’s thesis doing? You can understand it as basically testing two things going in different directions: on the one hand, it’s testing some of the limits of Role and Reference Grammar on its ability to deal with “detailed semantics of distinctions” (p2, quoting Butler 2003), especially related to temporality and aspectuality (tense and aspect). So it’s a thesis putting RRG to the test. How? by applying RRG to the Greek perfect. In the other direction, it’s testing a hypothesis about the Greek perfect, so the outcome ought to be a better notion of RRG in the area of semantic distinction, and conversely a better understanding of the Greek perfect. Great!

In chapter 2 of his thesis, Aubrey sets to work to talk about what RRG is and what it does. RRG breaks things down around 2 ‘representations’, Syntactic and Semantic. What I’m going to do is try and give you a dummies guide to Aubrey’s thesis. So, syntactic has to do with how you arrange the relationships between words (and word-y things, linguistic units, but let’s just stick with words in this version), and semantics has to do with meaning. Good? Great. RRG has a bunch of neat ways of talking about different states, events, and processes, and a few ways to carve up the space of syntax.

RRG is basically realist about language. Language talks about stuff. To do that you must have ‘predication’ and you must have ‘reference’. I.e, you must talk about something (a referent), and you must say something about it (predication). Language is a tool to achieve communication: to say Xs about Ys.

So onwards, RRG treats semantics as the basis for syntax. How one talks about the structure of language utterances is determined by the ‘what’, the meaning, of that utterance. This is why the predicate is the syntactic nucleus. It’s the heart of the heart of what’s going on in a clause! Then you add in an argument or two, and voila! it’s a core. What’s an argument? it’s an X or a Y you substitute into sentence to make it work. e.g. John eats violins. ‘John’ is an argument. ‘violins’ is an argument. They are variables that we use with a nucleus, with a predicate, with ‘eats’, to make a core.

I’m going to skip some stuff about operators. Let’s go to 2.1.2 Semantic representation. In this section RRG breaks down “what verbs do” into different classes. Aubrey presents 6

  1. States
  2. Achievements
  3. Accomplishments
  4. Activities
  5. Semelfactives
  6. Active-achievements

A state just describes what is. “I am dead”. There is nothing dynamic about a state. It doesn’t have to be an unchanging state. “I am hungry” is a state, but not an eternal one. All the rest are dynamic, they involve action, movement, change. Achievements and accomplishments sound like they are the same thing, but they’re not. “The window shattered” is an achievement: something happened and a new state was achieved, but the action was ‘all at once’, or ‘punctual’. “The window froze” is an accomplishment: it didn’t all at once freeze, it underwent a process of getting colder until it reached a state of being frozen. Activities are dynamic, but they don’t necessarily have an end point. “I swam” describes an activity.

The last two are expansions, as you can see from semel-factive’s breakdown, it is an achievement that is simultaneous but doesn’t involve a change of state. Whereas an active achievement takes an Activity and adds an endpoint. “I swam to work” for example.

There’s a really great table at 2.4 which shows how all these 6 classes are divided up by whether they are +/i Static, Dynamic, Telic, Punctual. Telic, if it’s unclear, is whether it has an end point.

Not only this, but just after 2.5, Aubrey fills you in on various ways to ‘test’ to see whether a predicate can be classified into each of the 6 categories.

What does all this have to do with Aspect? Good thing we’re reading a thesis on it. In section 2.2 Aubrey notes that there is a pretty big ‘gap’ between RRG’s description of different types of predicates, and the question of aspect. It’s the problem that Aspect really lies in the realm of operators, things that ‘do stuff’, neat stuff like, ‘mark and show you the aspect of the verb’.

When you come to tense and aspect, these are part of “the difficult issues of peripheral and complex grammatical categories”. So what’s a poor Greek linguist to do? Aubrey says, that what RRG needs is some better categorisation and tools for classifying what’s going on with tense and aspect. And that’s chapter 3.

Re-conceiving the middle voice for Greek and Latin students (IV)

December 27, 2018 By in Greek, Language, Latin Tags: , , , ,

We’ve spoken so far about a range of various ‘middle-domain’ events and actions, and in this post I focus in on our final group, related to Spontaneous Processes and Passive-Middles

(See posts one, two, and three to get up to speed. All this work derives primarily from Suzanne Kemmer and Rutger Allan, with some others thrown in for fun)

Spontaneous Process events and the Passive-Middle

Kemmer moves on in her monograph to cover a range of ‘other’ categories that “impinge” on the middle (142), the categories of the “spontaneous events” and the “passive middle”.

A spontaneous event is one in which “the entity undergoing the change [of state] is the chief nominal participant” and “in which no Agent entity receives coding.” That is, there’s a subject, who undergoes a change of state, and no agent is mentioned. There may or may not be a ‘conceivable’ agent.

Allan notes that a spontaneous process thus differs from the passive-middle, because the latter implies an unspecified agent, the SP tends to exclude one. SP often have active counterpart verbs in Greek that are causative.

This includes various possible subcategories. E.g. biological processes: dying, growing, aging; physiochemical: melting, freezing, rusting; changes in properties: ‘greening’, ‘squaring’ (okay, I made that one up, but presumably there exists a language where you can regularly form a verb from the adjective ‘square’ and express the change of state that results in a square).

Examples:
ἀπόλλυμαι – die
αὐξάνομαι – grow
γίγνομαι – come into being
τρέφομαι – grow up
φύομαι – grow
καίομαι – burn
τήκομαι – melt
λευκαίνομαι – become/grow white
θέρομαι  – become warm
φαίνομαι  – appear (Allan includes verbs of appearing & disappearing)

Allan also outlines reasons to adopt the “Spontaneous Process” label in preference to anticausative or similar (44) in that the middle form here is not secondary and derivative to a causal version or an active.

For Latin, we find

morior – to die
scindor – to tear, split
nascor – be born
orior – arise    (possible, certainly in its existential sense rather than posture)

Kemmer explores why these are middle in terms of the choice between portraying such an event as having an external Initiator (not always possible), or otherwise selecting the Patient as the chief participant and thus the event as ‘autonomous’.(145) In the case that there is an external Initiator, that participant is deemphasised. So “I die” might be an autonomous spontaneous process, or I might be killed by an angry proponent of grammar-translation, but even in the latter case, I have deemphasised the agent of the action.

Some types of non-volitional movement (e.g. shaking, cf. tremblor) may also be treated under this category; as well as generic ‘happen’ type verbs (γίγνομαι).

Kemmer goes on to consider passive-middles, in which an agent is understood to exist, but is deemphasised, whereas Allan treats that category prior to the SM. Allan also helpfully notes that several verbs in the SP category can be considered to occur with or without an external agent, and so categorisation is difficult in absolute terms. Nonetheless, in both cases, the Patient, and the change-of-state event, are the highlighted or dominant features of the presentation.

That basically concludes all the semantic categories treated in Kemmer, and mostly in Allan. And, I hope by now, you have some sense of how most Greek middle verbs readily fall into these categories.

The η/θη “passives” in diachronic and semantic focus

In the rest of today’s post I want to highlight the work of Allan, and Rachel Aubrey, in considering the η / θη aorist and future “passive” forms.

Allan

Allan’s work is broader, considering various morphological realisations of η vs θη as well as sigmatic aorists vs ‘passives’. In particularly, he does several interesting things: (1) considers the semantic distrubtion of alternatives, i.e. which categories of middle usage are found with which markers, (2) the morphological distribution, i.e. which stem-formations take which endings, (3) the diachronic development, i.e. how these forms shift over time from Homer onwards.

In Homer, he finds that SP favours η, passive or body motion favours θη. In classical, the distribution of all formation types shifts heavily from η to θη.

Over time, the collection of ‘middle-type’ categories, including the ‘passive-middle’, which are represented by the η/θη types, expands across the middle domain. Notably, Allan finds that the sigmatic aorist middle does not occur for Spontaneous Process or Passive-Middles in Homer, (111) but rather for animate subjects with volitional actions (111). There is overlap for mental process, collective motion, and body motion (112). By the classical period, the sigmatic is being used primarily for (indirect and direct reflexive, perception, mental activity, speech act, and reciprocal action), the θη type for (passive, spontaneous process, mental process, body motion, and collective motion) (117).

Why does this matter? Well, (1) the θη types are not a morphologically encoded passive as opposed to the sigmatic middle. Rather, the passive is a semantic subcategory. (2) that means there are simply two middle morphological forms in Greek, with the θη forms emerging from a “spontaneous process + passive-middle” core, but over time expanding to include other middle-type categories. (3) diachronically, the θη forms come to devour the sigmatic middles altogether; (4) in some verbs, contrastive sigmatic-middle vs. θη middle has semantic contrast, between different types of middle usage.

Aubrey

Rachel Aubrey, as I understand it, has been at work on a Masters’ thesis on the middle voice in Koine for some time, and I’m looking forward to it. She gives some anticipation of it in her article ‘Motivated Categories, Middle Voice, and Passive Morphology’[1]. She begins by highlighting the ways in which (θ)η forms break their expectations in not expressing passive syntax (566) and the fundamental problem with called (θ)η forms ‘deponents’ in expressing an ‘active’ meaning and ignoring the middle (567). On Aubrey’s construction (θ)η entered the language as expressing change of state, then extended to prototypical passives, and onward from there (571-2). Aubrey expresses it well in considering a semantic continuum, and that the sigmatic middles tended to express more agent-like or agent-active events, the (θ)η types as more patient-like. (573)

The -(θ)η- form is better understood as sharing a division of labor in the middle domain with the sigmatic middle forms than as an exclusively passive marker with defective, deponent exceptions. It marks the same set of middle event types subsumed within the semantic middle domain with respect to the other middle-passive morphology in the present and perfect paradigms.[2]

She also reaches further back, to PIE, in seeing the origin of (θ)η in the state-predicate marker *-eh1– which grammaticalizes into an aspect-voice inflectional marker (578-9).

Both Allan and Aubrey suggest that the (θ)η emerged in the aorist (and future) but not present because (θ)η is associated with telicity (i.e. the event has a conceptual ‘end-point’ which is reached), which the imperfective aspect forms (e.g. the present tense), do not.

Aubrey’s article goes on to give a robust prototypical explanation of semantic categories, participant roles, and the like, focused on the (θ)η forms. It concludes robustly with a reconsideration of the (θ)η forms along the same lines as Kemmer and Allan point us to.

Changing our categorization of -(θ)η- from the analogous English counterpart (passive) to a typologically attested middle form alters our view of Greek voice. Instead of seeing it as a passive marker with defective active outliers in an active-passive system, -(θ)η- is rightly treated as marking the less-transitive middle events—including passives—within a larger transitivity continuum in an active-middle system. The middle share of the space divides the labor across two morphological forms in the aorist and future compared to one in the present and perfect.[3]

And with that, I leave you for this post. In coming posts I will discuss some varieties of semi-deponency, talk about Latin’s voice system in more depth, and conclude with some application for reading and for pedagogy.

 

[1] Rachel Aubrey, “Motivated Categories, Middle Voice, and Passive Morphology,” in The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis, ed. Steven E. Runge and Christopher J. Fresch (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016), 563.

[2] Rachel Aubrey, “Motivated Categories, Middle Voice, and Passive Morphology,” in The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis, ed. Steven E. Runge and Christopher J. Fresch (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016), 575.

[3] Rachel Aubrey, “Motivated Categories, Middle Voice, and Passive Morphology,” in The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis, ed. Steven E. Runge and Christopher J. Fresch (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016), 620.

The Pilot and the Mechanic

December 22, 2017 By in Uncategorized

(These are some notes I am drawing up for an Intro Greek class; the proximate source the analogy is Mike Aubrey over at koine-greek.com. It’s a very versatile analogy, when you put it to use; like all analogies, it has points of dis-analogy though.

Welcome to flight school! Before we get going in learning Greek, I want to talk about two type of learning, and the type of approach we’ll be taking in this course.

Languages are incredibly interesting things, and they can also do incredibly useful things. In this way, a language is a bit like a plane. Planes can fly, which is amazing, but it’s also what they were designed to do.

When it comes to learning a language, what do we mean? Researchers in the area of Second Language Acquisition (that is, learning any language that you did not learn by growing up with it from childhood) distinguish between (a) learning a language, and (b) learning about a language.

The first is actually acquiring the ability to use a language – to speak/hear/read/write the language. Many of you may know several language like this. Most of us learnt our first language like this. This is language acquisition.

The second is learning about how a language works. That is, things like grammar (the rules governing a language), or more broadly linguistics (the scientific analysis of language). This is language learning.

These two things are not the same. They are related, they can influence each other, but they don’t lead to each other directly. Language acquisition is like going to flight school, and language learning or Grammar, is like going to mechanical school.

A pilot knows how to fly a plane. They can take it up in the air and control it. They may not even really understand how their plane works on the inside, but they know how to fly it. So too with languages – people speak, read, understand, all the time, often without knowing how their language ‘works’, indeed they can even have lots of wrong ideas about how their language works, and still use it perfectly well.

A mechanic knows how the plane works. They understand the pieces, how they fix together, how it all functions. That’s a lot like being a linguist – a trained linguist understands how languages work, and often in detail how a particular language or group of languages works. They don’t need to speak those languages (and very often don’t!). But they might! A mechanic might also know how to fly a plane, but that’s not what it takes to be a mechanic. A pilot might learn about the mechanics of their plane, which is really helpful, but not the same as flying.

Pilots, Mechanics, and You.

A lot of ancient languages, including Koine Greek, have traditionally been taught using the ‘mechanic’ approach, for various reasons. This tends to produce people who are successful at analysing Greek passages. It is a very slow way of producing people who can read and understand Greek texts.

I take it that our goal here is primarily two-fold:

  • to learn to read Greek well enough to read the New Testament with some degree of fluency and ease (and other Koine literature).
  • to learn to analyse Greek in order to talk about the grammar of texts, and to interact with scholarly work on the New Testament (and other Koine literature).

The first is a flying goal, the second is a mechanical goal. You might lean more towards one or the other, you might find one or the other easier. You might find one or the other intimidating. Those are perfectly normal and fine reactions to have.

In this course, then, I’m trying to both teach you to fly, and teach you the mechanics of how planes work. That is, I’m going to be trying to teach you to understand Koine Greek as a proper, living language that you can not only read, but speak/hear/write a little bit (though our focus in the end will be reading). I’ll also be teaching you the nuts and bolts of how Greek works.

I expect that most of you want to be better pilots, and if you’ve ever studied an ancient language, I also expect that you think studying mechanics is the way to get there. That’s the biggest myth I want to dispel today – studying the blueprints of a plane does very little to help you fly it. So, too, the rate of return on studying grammar to understanding a language fluently is marginal. Not zero, but definitely not high.

 

 

The New understandings in Greek, Part 2: Aktionsart

September 28, 2015 By in Greek 3 Comments

So last time I talked about the shift from thinking about Greek as tense based/focused to aspect focused. Another term that you can hear a lot about these days is Aktionsart.

But what is Aktionsart?

The bad news is that people use this term in different ways. The word Aktionsart means ‘type of action’. So we’re interested in what type of action a verb is describing.

The main disjunct is that Aktionsart is sometimes used for the type of action embedded in the meaning of a word. This is Lexical Aktionsart. Here’s an example: eating a pizza. This action has a natural endpoint (when all the pizza is gone and in my belly). Compare, sitting at my desk. ‘sitting’ does not have a natural endpoint. I could sit at my desk forever. Lexical Aktionsart is invariant, and it’s probably more common to talk about Aktionsart as Lexical Aktionsart outside the Greek grammar world.

Sometimes Aktionsart is used to describe Aspect. This is a problem in some older Grammars, and is mainly just a terminology confusion. If you encounter this, just be clear about what the Author is actually discussing.

Thirdly, Aktionsart can be used to describe the ‘type of action’ “as it happens out there in the real world”. I.e., the action that our words are talking about, as an external, objective, action, what sort of action is/was it?

Lexical Aktionsart and this third type of Aktionsart are considerably different: L.Ak is intrinsic to the word (lexeme). This third type, which at least for today I’m going to call ‘Objective Aktionsart’, depends primarily on the action/event itself, and has to be figured out from context. But then there’s a kind of fourth way of talking about Aktionsart that is (1) Lexical Aktionsart possibilities + (2) Aspect and Tense-Form + (3) Usage in a clause/context = (4) ‘Aktionsart’. This I would call something like pragmatic Aktionsart. It’s an analysis of ‘type of action’ conducted post-factum once you put together everything you know about the verb and its context.

So, how do we get to some actual Aktionsarten?

Vendler classified verbs into four categories:

  1. Activity: has duration but no end point (progressive, atelic): I am sitting
  2. Accomplishment: has duration and end point (progressive, telic): I am writing a blog post
  3. Achievement: no duration but has an end point (instantaneous, telic): I had an idea
  4. State: has duration but not a process

You can often test whether a verb/clause works for a category by the type of adverbial phrase you can add:

Activity: I sat for 10 years (duration of time without a telos)

Accomplishment: I wrote a blog post in 10 minutes (fixed duration of time with end point)

Achievement: I had an idea at 2:37am (specific instant of time)

But wait… what about something that has no duration, and is also atelic? Bernard Comrie came up with a category for this: semelfactive. This includes actions like ‘sneeze’ and ‘knock’. They are instantaneous but they do not have an ‘end’ per se. Another way to put this is that the difference between an achievement and a semelfactive is that the former has involves a change of state (idea-lessness, idea+fullness), whereas the latter does not (before and after I sneeze, I am still in the same condition of being).

Another category is added in RRG (Role and reference grammar), ‘active achievements’; one does this by creating a complex or compound, i.e. by taking an activity and adding an end point:

Mike Aubrey wrote for months    – Activity

Mike Aubrey wrote a thesis – Active Achievement

(I use Aubrey because that’s where I stole the last category from in writing this post) So now we’re up to six categories.

 

  Static? Dynamic? Telic? Punctual?
State + – – –
Activity – + – –
Accomplishment – – + –
Semelfactive – ± – +
Achievement – – + +
Active Achievement – + + –

 

Okay, so that’s a linguistics-derived model of Aktionsart. How does this feed into Koine Greek grammar?

What I tend to see in writing about Greek grammar is a kind of blend of lexical, pragmatic, and objective Aktionsart. This is confusing! For example, two Aktionsarten often mentioned are iterative and conative. These are repeated actions, and attempted actions, respectively. These certainly aren’t (usually) lexical Aktionsarten; they can be objective Aktionsarten. Usually they are talked about as pragmatic Aktionsarten. What’s a poor student to do?

Here’s the type of list you might encounter among Greek grammarians:

  1. Conative: The action was attempted but not accomplished. (from the Latin conari, to try, attempt, endeavour). ex. I tried to study (Greek grammar, but it was too hard)
  2. Gnomic: The action is universal/timeless/generic. ex. Those that study, learn.
  3. Ingressive: The action began and is in progress. (Latin ingredi, to undertake, begin) . Ex. I began to study.
  4. Iterative: The action occurs repeatedly (though not constantly). (Latin, iterare, to repeat, redo) I keep studying Greek (to no avail).
  5. Progressive: The action is in progress. Ex. I am studying Greek (fruitlessly)
  6. Punctiliar: The action is presented as instantaneously done. I handed in that exam paper.
  7. Summary: The action is presented as a unitary or summary action. I studied Greek.

Some of these categories are pragmatic, but not all.

Take home value for the Greek reader:

  1. It’s really important that you understand the difference between Lexical Aktionsart and ‘pragmatic’ Aktionsart. Lex.Ak. is all about the lexeme, about the level of the word. It doesn’t change. Because it’s lexical. It’s actually better to think about Lexical Aktionsart as a range of possibilities, because a single verb (such as to study) can have different Aktionsarten depending on how it’s used:

A: I have been studying Greek all year. – Activity.

B: I studied this Greek text book. – Accomplishment.

But at the same time there are some Aktionsarten that to study cannot have. For example ‘study’ is not stative.

  1. So you need to think through what’s inherent to the word, and what is variable.
  2. Then you need to think through the use of the word in a clause and context. In Greek, this is going to mean considering the aspect and the tense-form, and the modifiers if any, and the context of the clause. All of these are going to shape how you understand the ‘objective occurrence in the world’ that the utterance is referring to.
  3. Only then can you really slap some kind of Aktionsart label onto something like ‘conative’ or ‘iterative’.

This is why I said at the start you can almost ignore Aktionsart. Aktionsart doesn’t actually tell you anything, it helps you articulate what you ought to already know. It gives you a set of categories and a grid of perception to think through what is actually being described, i.e. the ‘type of action’. And then, when you’ve thought that process through, you have a label to stick on it. But Aktionsart is not a category that actually gets you there – it’s not like tense-form or aspect or even person, number, mood, etc..

To put this another way, if I tell you something is perfective or imperfective, it changes how you look at that verb and think about it. If I tell you its Aktionsart, I haven’t told you anything that you couldn’t put together from the pieces of the puzzle in the first place, and so you haven’t necessarily gained any new information. Pragmatic Aktionsart is a post-factum description of what’s going on once you know what’s going on, not a prior piece of working out what’s going on.

I’m not sure I’ve really quite succeeded in this post to explain Aktionsart in a way that’s clear and accessible. I might need to give it another go. Let me know how this helped you or didn’t.

The New understandings in Greek, Part 1: Verbs, Aspect and Tense

September 22, 2015 By in Greek 3 Comments

A couple of people asked me how to go about getting up to speed on the ‘newer ways’ of talking about Ancient Greek that have become current in the last few years. In this and subsequent posts I will try my best to provide a relatively accessibly explanation of the major shifts in some of these areas, particularly for those who were trained in Koine Greek in traditional classes and are mostly used to older terminology.

This week we’re talking about the Greek verbal system.

If you pick up a traditional grammar textbook, the presentation of Greek verbs tends to break things down primarily by tenses: Present, Imperfect, Aorist, Future, Perfect, Pluperfect. Often introduced in that order too (The future gets moved around a little bit). Basically you’re taught to treat these like English tenses, with some minor modifications:

Present = English General Present & Present Continuous

Imperfect = English Past Continuous (and Past General)

Aorist = English Simple Past (and gets talked about as ‘punctiliar’, even ‘once for all’)

Future = English Future

Perfect = English Past Perfect (have verbed) (and gets talked about as ‘past with present consequences)

Pluperfect = English Further Past Perfect (had verbed)

There are advantages to this system: it actually works reasonably well as a short-hand guide for translation. It also makes things readily accessible to someone who only knows English.

But, there are several problems with this approach. Firstly, it does a very poor job of explaining tense-choice outside the indicative. Secondly, it is the outcome of an attempt to impose a Latinate grammar structure onto Greek. And that’s not good for Greek. As a Latinist, let me say this isn’t Latin’s fault. In English textbooks, it is often the relic of having tried to impose Latin grammatical categories onto English (also a bad way to do English grammar) and then onto Greek.

Introducing Aspect

Somewhere along the line grammarians woke up and realised linguistics existed. And that Latin was not the ur-language of the heavens (Gaelic is). And that other languages functioned with a category that we call Aspect. Aspect, as you can tell if you think about the word itself, is about how you view the action. In languages that have aspect, one reasonably common dichotomy is between a perfective and imperfective aspect.

perfective aspect means looking at the action as a whole, from an exterior viewpoint, as a complete entity

imperfective aspect means looking at the action in process, from an internal viewpoint, as an ongoing entity.

Both of these are choices of the speaker in describing the action, not features of the action itself. I can describe the same reality in two ways. For example,

  1. I studied Greek
  2. I was studying Greek

Sentence 1 is perfective, it describes this action as a whole, complete entity. Sentence 2 is imperfective, it describes this action as an ongoing process. This has nothing to do with tense.

Now, the closer we looked at Greek, the more we realised that Aspect was far more important to Greek than grammatical time (tense), and that the way Greek organised itself made Aspect (a) more fundamental, (b) not optional. By ‘not optional’ I mean that every time you use a Greek verb, you make a choice about aspect, you must make a choice about aspect. You don’t have to make choices about time.

As a consequence, the categories we call ‘tenses’ are not always tenses. That’s why you see a shift to calling them ‘tense-forms’, to highlight that they are forms more than simply tenses.

So we can reorganise those Greek verbs based on their aspect:

Perfective: Aorist

Imperfective: Present, Imperfect

Great, except this is only 3 out of 6 tenses. What about the other 3?

The perfect and pluperfect, when viewed in terms of aspect, turn out not to be perfective or imperfective but something else. And there isn’t consensus about how to describe that. It’s not helped that now we have some real terminological confusion: we’re talking about the ‘perfect’ tense-form, but it’s not perfective in aspect! One, fairly common, approach is to call it ‘stative’ in aspect, i.e. referring to a state of being. Con Campbell’s hypothesis is that both are actually imperfective, but that the perfect tense-form has ‘heightened proximity’ and the pluperfect tense-form has ‘heightened remoteness’. Personally, I’m persuaded by Mike Aubrey’s recent thesis, in which he says, ‘the perfect aspect refers to internal temporal structure that is either completed (completive) or exists as achieved state (resultative). It is inherently telic and will either assign an endpoint to a situation or event or denote the resultant state of that situation or event. As such, the perfect is both telic and bounded.’ (Appendix B, p199). That’s a bit complex and you can let it go over your head for now.

So there’s relative consensus that the perfect and pluperfect are doing their own thing, but there’s some discussion about what that thing is.

What about the future? Again, there’s some discussion, though generally the drift seems to be towards seeing the future tense-form as properly time significant before it’s aspectual. That is, because what demarcates the future is its time reference, there aren’t two or three different aspects for the future, there’s just the future that incorporates whatever aspect for the future tense.

What does this mean for the average Joe?

  1. It’s more important for Greek verbs to think about their aspect, before you think about their tense.
  2. Tense is almost always marked either by (a) the presence of the augment (i.e. usually the ἐ augment or its counterpart), or (b) determined contextually by things like adverbs or other indicators.
  3. The significance of choosing a tense-form lies first in considering its aspect, not in notions like ‘once for all’, ‘past with present consequences’, etc., which are almost always misleading suggestions.

 

Did this help you? Could something be explained better? Do you want to correct something I’ve said? Let me know in the comments below.

Next time I’ll talk about Aktionsart and why you can mostly ignore it most of the time.

 

 

 

What the Patrologist does for a summer break

January 12, 2015 By in Updates

It is, of course, the summer in the Southern hemisphere. We are now into the second week of the Greek summer school, and we’ve moved on from Polycarp’s Martyrdom to Perpetua’s. The text of Perpetua is quite a fascinating one. If you read the Greek recension, you get a number of interesting linguistic features, as well as an exposure to ‘translation Greek’. At the same time, there are very interesting theological elements in the text: the idea of special benefit from prayer immediately connected to baptism, receptivity to visions and prophecy in keeping with Montanist tendencies, special efficacy of prayer connected with being a confessor, what appears to be a transfer from eternal punishment to heavenly reward for someone already deceased on the basis of Perpetua’s prayer, and other such interesting elements.

It’s also a pleasure to read with a group of students. They continue to both point out things I have missed or occasionally misunderstood, as well as ask questions I have not really thought of. I’m looking forward to revising the Patristic Reader edition.

 

In the rest of my time I have been trying to reorient myself in my studies, as well as prepare materials for a week of Latin the following week. In the midst of this I’m also trying to organise and plan out the year. So it’s plenty busy here. And then on my downtime I’m tackling M. Aubrey’s thesis on the Greek perfect.