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Greek Verb Aspect

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Greek Verb Aspect Greek Verb Aspect Paul Bell & William S. Annis Scholiastae.org∗ February 21, 2012 The technical literature concerning aspect is vast and difficult. The goal of this tutorial is to present, as gently as possible, a few more or less commonly held opinions about aspect. Although these opinions may be championed by one academic quarter and denied by another, at the very least they should shed some light on an abstruse matter. Introduction The word “aspect” has its roots in the Latin verb specere meaning “to look at.” Aspect is concerned with how we view a particular situation. Hence aspect is subjective – different people will view the same situation differently; the same person can view a situation differently at different times. There is little doubt that how we see things depends on our psychological state at the mo- ment of seeing. The ‘choice’ to bring some parts of a situation into close, foreground relief while relegating others to an almost non-descript background happens unconsciously. But for one who must describe a situation to others, this choice may indeed operate consciously and deliberately. Hence aspect concerns not only how one views a situation, but how he chooses to relate, to re-present, a situation. A Definition of Aspect But we still haven’t really said what aspect is. So here’s a working definition – aspect is the dis- closure of a situation from the perspective of internal temporal structure. To put it another way, when an author makes an aspectual choice in relating a situation, he is choosing to reveal or conceal the situation’s internal temporal structure. This definition raises the question “What does ‘internal temporal structure’ mean?” The sim- plest answer is that while some verbs and verbal expressions reveal a situation as whole, others reveal it as composite - consisting of parts. ∗This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Originally written in 2004 as a tutorial for Textkit.com. 1 When a verb reveals a situation as consisting of parts, making explicit reference to some of those parts, we say it has imperfective aspect. When a verb reveals a situation as whole, without explicit reference to its parts, we say it has perfective aspect. Example 1: I was walking. Example 2: I walked The verb “walking” in the first example, by making explicit reference to a part of the walking — the middle part that occurs after starting to walk but before stopping to walk — reveals walking as composite. The verb “walking” here reveals the internal temporal structure of the walking activity; it has imperfective aspect. The verb “walked” in the second example subsumes the activity of walking into a single, in- divisible whole. The verb “walked” here conceals the internal temporal structure of the walking activity; it has perfective aspect. You could say that it conceals the composite nature of the ac- tivity. It is important to realize that situations disclosed by means of perfective aspect do not nec- essarily lack internal temporal structure. Rather the perfective aspect forbids explicit reference to this structure. Other words and phrases that describe how imperfective aspect discloses a sit- uation include: iterative, durative, in progress, continuous, habitual, internal view, transparent (you can “see inside” the situation). Other words that describe how perfective aspect discloses a situation include: complete, punctual, external view, opaque (you cannot “see inside” the situa- tion). Historical Foundations The aspectual system of ancient Greek has its origins in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) parent language. The PIE verbal system recognized two functional classes of verbs: eventive and stative. Eventive verbs describe things that happen. Examples of eventive verbs are “strike,” “kill,” and “find.” The much smaller class of stative verbs describe states or conditions. Examples include “know,” “hate,” and “be dead.” PIE’s eventive verbs were further divided into two categories called punctual and durative. Membership in one or the other category was largely determined by the meaning of the verb — specifically whether or not the verb’s action requires a lapse of time. “strike” is inherently punctual; “walk” is inherently durative. Aspect in Ancient Greek In ancient Greek this division – durative, punctual, stative – gave rise respectively to the present, aorist, and perfect “tenses.” These ‘tense’ stems – present, aorist, and perfect – are nicely exhibited in the Greek verb λείπω: 2 Present λείπ-ω Aorist ἔ-λιπ-ον Perfect λέ-λοιπ-α It must be stressed that the primary force of these stems is aspectual, not temporal: the present tense denotes imperfective aspect, and the aorist tense denotes perfective aspect. What About the Perfect Tenses? As noted above, the perfect tenses have their origin in PIE’s stative verbs. Despite the unhappy similarity between the terms perfective and perfect, please bear in mind that the perfect tenses do not denote aspect. Unlike the perfective and imperfective aspects, the perfect tenses are not concerned with the disclosure of a situation’s internal temporal structure. Rather, they describe a state persisting in the past, present, or future. Moreover, unlike the perfective and imperfective aspects, the perfect tenses relate the time of these states to a prior point in time when the state did or does not exist. These relations are depicted in this table: T-2 T-1 Now T+1 T+2 Pluperfect (“he had died”) t S Perfect (“he has died”) t S Future Perfect (“he will have died”) t S Each tense relates the time of some state (S) to a time (t) prior to that state. In the pluperfect the time of S is in the past. In the perfect the time of S is the present. In the future perfect the time of S is in the future. Even though the perfect tenses do not denote aspect, it is nonetheless customary to treat them as having perfective aspect.1 We will follow this convention so as to simplify our presenta- tion. What About the Future Tense? Although there is good reason to think that the future tense was originally perfective, it is now generally considered aspect neutral. This means that a given form, e.g., gra/yw, can be rightly translated – context notwithstanding – imperfectively (I will be writing) or perfectively (I will write). 1Note from Wm (2012): Actually, the perfect is a strange enough thing that linguists still argue about what exactly is going on with it. Know that plenty of them would object to considering them perfective. It’s also worth noting that the perfect has subtly different meanings in different periods of Greek. Homer’s use of the perfect is quite different from Plato’s, which in turn is quite different from that in the Koiné. Consult your favorite period grammar. 3 The Aspects of the Greek Tenses Without regard, then, to notions of temporality, we can arrange these “tenses” by their aspectual force into two lists (note again that for a simplified presentation, we reluctantly group the perfect tenses in the perfective column): Perfective Imperfective Aorist Present Future Future Perfect Imperfect Pluperfect Future Perfect Please note that we have so far presented a “radical” view of tense because we have largely ignored its temporal significance. (There are indeed a few authorities who deny Greek tense any temporal force.) Note also that many traditional grammars fail to clearly distinguish aspect from tense. By deliberately ignoring the temporal force of tense, we have been better able to clarify what we mean by aspect. But if we again grant tense its familiar temporal force, we can produce a table of the several Greek tenses that relates aspect to time: Perfective Imperfective Past Aorist (“I walked”) Imperfect (“I was walking”) Pluperfect (“I had walked”) Present Perfect (“I have walked”) Present (“I am walking”) Future Future (“I will walk”) Future (“I will be walking”) Future Perfect (“I will have walked”) On To Greek Now that we’ve covered some of the theory of aspect, we turn to examples. We’ll touch only briefly on aspect in simple sentences since it is in the relationship between main and subordinate clauses that aspect is most likely to be confusing to beginners. Traditional Greek instruction, in particular, is apt to cause problems. When you’ve been told the aorist is primarily a past tense, the aorist imperative is going to seem puzzling: “raised the sails” doesn’t make much sense. We are going to omit conditional sentences from our examples. What we have to say about aspect applies to these, too, and in fact simplifies the usual inventory of conditional types. But explaining the additional role of tense and mood would distract from our focus on aspect. In the discussion below the most important thing to keep in mind - and which we’ll repeat a few times for good measure - is that only the indicative verb forms of the present, aorist and perfect may have tense. All the rest do not. 4 Durative (Present) Stem Verb forms made from the durative stem (traditionally known as the ”present” stem) show im- perfective aspect. In the indicative this includes the present and imperfect conjugations: βλέπω “I see, I am seeing,” ἔβλεπον “I was seeing.” Above we said that the imperfective aspect shows an action in progress, in the middle of going on. So, in non-indicative clauses the present forms view the action as on-going, generally at the same time as the main verb. For example, βαδίζων λέγει “(while) walking, he speaks.” Here the present form λέγει does indicate tense, but βαδίζων indicates aspect, namely, that the walking is seen as ongoing at the time of the speaking.
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