>Unfortunately, I don't think we except Matthew 2:14-15
>from Porter's view simply because it has bounds. This
>is because Porter defines "imperfective" aspect as, not
>whether or not it has bounds, but "The present and
>imperfect tense-forms occur in contexts where the user
>of Greek wishes to depict and action as in progress,
>regardless of whether this is an objective characterization."
>(Idioms p.29). The fact that the "continual existence" has
>temporal bounds does not remove the "imperfective" aspect of the verb.
Actually, I find that fortunate. This agrees with what I understand about
imperfective aspect from other writers, and what I had remembered from Porter.
>So, my view from the history of b-greek is that ALL
>uses of EIMI as a verb of existence has bounds unless
>the context tells us otherwise. But these uses still
>have an "imperfective" aspect (Porter) or what Rolf
>(and/or others) would call "stative."
Imperfective is the aspect conveyed by the syntactic forms. Stative is the
nature of the verb. A stative verb is a verb that has no change [-change].
According to Fanning, states are also unbounded [-bounded] and durative
[+durative]. In his model, a verb is either bounded or unbounded. However, I
rather prefer Mari Olsen's model, which says that a verb can be either
marked as bounded or not marked in terms of boundedness. The distinction is
that in Mari's model, if a verb is not bounded, then it is not actively
"unbounded", it just doesn't say anything about its boundedness that can't
be corrected by the context.
>I anticipate he will try to provide evidence for adjusting
>the "imperfective" aspect (Porter) for EIMI to a "stative"
>view, and I am interested in what that evidence is.
We'll see. It may well be that he is arguing from Fanning's description of
states as [-bounded].
Jonathan
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Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie
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