In Part I, we tried to give a basic overview of what aspect is, along with one practical application for paying attention to aspect. In Part II, we considered some of the various points of agreement and disagreement among scholars on this topic. With this background, we are in a better place to discuss perfect aspect. Part III provides a condensation of parts of my chapter on the perfect in Black & Merkle (2020).
Tense-Aspect
There is effectively no debate about the definition of aspect in Greek. There is also effectively no debate about the definitions of the imperfective and perfective aspects, two categories we discussed in Part I. This is true whether you’re reading Fanning (1990), Decker (2007), Campbell (2007), any of the contributors to Runge & Fresch (2016), or anyone else.
Is this the best blog post for introducing people to aspect?
I’m not sure, but I hope that it will be helpful, nonetheless.
“Verbal Aspect Theory” and its companion “Aktionsart Theory” are both phrases that need to be reconsidered. The way it gets used by NT grammarians is anachronistic and leads to misreadings of the grammatical literature.
In preparing for the SEBTS conference, Linguistics and New Testament Greek: Key Issues in the Current Debate, I […]
A few weeks ago I put a poll up on Twitter and another one on Facebook, asking whether people thought that a particular verb had the perfect as part of its inflectional paradigm.
But there’s a far simpler explanation of the data that does not need Porter’s overwrought prominence model.
How can there be any substantive discussion about language data or linguistic method if we cannot even agree on the history of research? New Testament Greek grammar is simply broken. And nobody seems interested in trying to fix it. So where do we go from here?
Tense and aspect are central for narrative text. The perfective and imperfective aspect, particularly, are essential for how an author builds a narrative structure and signals to the reader the flow of the story.
While working on editing the three parts of my review into a cohesive whole document to make available […]
Koine-Greek 