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4/25/2008 Verbal aspect theoryIn 1989 Stanley Porter produced Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with reference to Tense and Mood - a revolutionary work in the field of New Testament studies! The New Testament was written in Greek, and verbs are rendered in various tenses such as present, aorist, perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, future. First year Greek is all about learning that this is an aorist verb, this is an imperfect verb and that is a pluperfect. However second year Greek is all about learning the significance of an aorist, an imperfect, and a pluperfect. And for many years the predominant way that people understood what these verb tenses was about was with a model called Aktionsart. This argues that verb tenses (particularly in the indicative) are primarily to do with time (past, future or present) just like English, and outside of the indicative have to do with the kind of action of the verb (progressive, simple occurrence, completed). This Aktionsart theory of verb tenses is what you'd find in intermediate Greek grammars. And technical commentaries would employ Aktionsart by describing this verb here as "punctiliar", or another verb there as having "occurred in the past with present results". Porter's book challenged the whole theory of Aktionsart. He showed that the exceptions outnumber the rule - you could find present indicative verbs that obviously had past, present, future and even non-temporal time references! And so he questioned whether the tenses had anything to do with time at all! Porter argues that in fact, rather than tenses portraying the objective nature of the action, its is actually the subjective conception of the action by the writer. The different tenses show us an action through different eyes. In verbal aspect theory, there are essentially three verbal aspects:
Picture a large parade, slowly making its way through the main street of a city. A writer could use different tenses to portray the action of the parade through different eyes. So for instance the perfective aspect is like being shown the parade as a whole from the vantage point of a helicopter hovering high overhead, where you can see the complete parade all at once. The imperfective aspect is like viewing the parade from the grandstands as first one then another float passes by you. And the stative aspect is like viewing the parade from the organiser's control room, where different cameras and status updates give you the state of every different part of the parade all at once. This is what is meant by aspect being about subjective conception and not objective nature. In objective reality, the action of the verb may have ceased a long time ago (ie. the actual parade may have occurred five years ago). But as the writer writes his account of the parade, he may do so portraying it for us from the eyes of a person seeing it from the grandstand (hence using the imperfect tense), or perhaps from the vantage point of the helicopter (hence using the aorist). Verbal aspect theory makes sense of the many head-scratching exceptions of Aktionsart, and you will increasingly see it being used in technical commentaries. Aside from Stanley Porter, verbal aspect theory is being promoted by Don Carson at TEDS. And in Sydney, Moore College is actually on the forefront of work in verbal aspect theory, with Peter O'Brien having used it in his Ephesians commentary and his soon-to-be-released Hebrews commentary, and Con Campbell with his recent Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative (Con classifies the perfect tense as imperfective aspect)! [ PS: many pastors have been trained to use Aktionsart and quite likely won't have read anything on verbal aspect theory! ] Comments (3)
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