Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research (Bloomsbury Academic Collections)

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“It means, for instance, that insofar as verbal aspect has been grammaticalized in the morphology of the Greek verb, one cannot immediately leap to the kind of event to which reference is being made (Aktionsart), or to the time of event to which reference is being made (as in a time-based analysis of the verbal system), but to the writer’s or speaker’s decision to depict the event in a particular way. The bearing of this result on exegesis cannot easily be overestimated.” (Page 22)

“Porter adopts terminology common in Slavonic linguistics, and finds three fundamental aspects: perfective, grammaticalized in the aorist; imperfective, grammaticalized in the present and the imperfect, and the stative, grammaticalized in the perfect and pluperfect.” (Page 24)

“Various developments in comparative philology led many in the second half of the nineteenth century to link tense-forms not to time but to the kind of action that actually occurred—in short, to Aktionsart.” (Page 18)

“From the vantage point of Porter, then, Fanning so seriously confuses semantics and pragmatics that his work is fatally flawed. Without any consistent, undergirding theory of the semantic contributions made by the morphology of the Greek verbal system Fanning’s approach, in Porter’s view, is methodologically arbitrary and linguistically without rigor.” (Page 24)

“Both works realize the importance of the semantic category of verbal aspect for understanding the structure of the Greek verbal system, as well as its potential implications for exegesis.” (Page 31)