I’m working on my thesis right now and I’ve been looking through various definitions of the terms aspect, perfectivity, imperfectivity, stativity, resultative, and so forth–the standard terms applied to the Greek aspectul inflectional forms (I’ve also looked at less standard terms, but those are easier to find definitions of).

I’ve worked through Fanning, Porter, Campbell, in particular, as well as McKay and a number of linguists who have written on the issues. And in the process, I have come across something that I find incredibly surprising. It may very well be that I simply cannot find them. The best I have seen is either Porter summarizing other scholar’s definitions or his parade analogy. The problem is that the former are consistently summarized and then criticized, which makes it far from clear whether he would use their definitions, whereas the latter seems to excessively informal and less than appropriate for the definitive definitions of the categories in a published, highly technical dissertation.

Am I missing something? Does Porter define the terms perfective, imperfective, and stative and I’ve just missed them? The definitions are clearly and explicitly stated in his intermediate grammar, why should they be so hard to find in his dissertation

If anyone has a suggestion as to where to look, I would be eternally grateful.

Ἀπορῶ…