stative verbs and imperfective aspect in Porter
Mari Broman Olsen (molsen@umiacs.umd.edu)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 09:09:02 -0400 (EDT)
One reason for the confusion is that Porter does not systematically
distinguish between lexical aspect (what the verbs bring to the
interpretation) and grammatical aspect (what the grammatical
morphology contributes to the interpretation). A second confounding
is that between semantics (what something must mean in all contexts,
e.g. that eimi describes something that is not ercomai, etc.) and
pragmatics (that it is sometimes a temporary state, sometimes
permanent, etc.). Laws of thermodynamics (or some common sense
encoding thereof) tell us that states are generally not infinite in duration,
but that does not come from the verb, so that it is not grammatically
inconsistent to talk about eternal existence, etc., like it is to talk
about female fathers (a collocation which does contradict the
semantic contributions of the individual words).
While I am tirading, let me say that the passage Wes Williams cites
from Porter, suggesting tenses refer to "absolute time" rather than
relative time is a straw man for the tense theory for the greek verbs.
All tenses are relative to some time: the question is whether they are
consistently past, present, or future with respect to that
pragmatically controlled reference time.
Mari
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Mari Broman Olsen
Research Associate
University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
3141 A.V. Williams Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658
molsen@umiacs.umd.edu
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