Perfect/Stative - PEPISTEUKA JOHN 11:27

Clayton Bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Fri, 15 Aug 1997 10:34:22 +0000

I was reading the account of Lazarus resurrection in John 11 and
Martha's reply in verse 27 started me thinking about the meaning
of the perfect. So I grabbed whatever was close at hand which
happened to be Richard Young's grammar (a good book, well
worth owning) and read what he had to say about the perfect and
the stative aspect. This left me confused. I get confused rather
easily.

On page 106 Young defines the stative aspect
(perfect/pluperfect) as *a condition or a state of affairs.* On
pages 126 -128 Young gives about six meanings (uses?) of the
perfect, one of which is to define the present *state of affairs.*

Now I sense that there is some sort of confusion here if we have
*state of affairs* showing up both as a definition of the aspect
*stative* and also one of the meanings (uses?) of the perfect.

This raises a number of thorny questions which I will not pursue
now. If you are in the habit of thinking about high level language
architecture models then the thorny questions will be almost
self evident. If not the push *delete* and move on.

*a additional note for technoids*

The architecture of the model Young seems to be using appears
to be self-referencing in infelicitous manner. That is, Young has a
high level *aspect* definition (i.e., stative - state of affairs)
which reappears at a lower level of semantic definition (i.e.,
perfect - state of affairs). This leads me to suspect that there
are problems with this model generally.

Clay Bartholomew
Three Tree Point

Additional Note on terminology in the additional note for
technoids: *Low* and *High* levels (in reference to definitions)
are used in a arbitrary way here. Depending on how you draw your
model, these terms could be interchanged or even deleted.