From: clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Tue Nov 14 2000 - 20:15:27 EST
Wayne,
I agree with you. People find a way to make themselves understood.
What makes me probe the question of the relationship between aspect and verb
marking is the phenomenon of predictability. What I am saying is, you can
read along in a Hellenistic Greek text and before you see the verb and its
form you can predict what the form will be. Why is this so? Because the
tense/aspect information is being carried somewhere else in the text, at
some other level of the language system.
This verb morphology predictability allows one to also speculate with a high
degree of success about textual variants. In other words you can play the
game "guess what the Majority Text will read here." When you run into a verb
marked with a tense/aspect that is contrary to what you predicted then you
can almost always find a group of manuscripts that changed it to what you
predicted.
So I am not saying that formal tense/aspect marking of the verb is
irrelevant in Hellenistic Greek or that we can ignore it. I am just saying
that tense/aspect information is provided in other ways than the formal
characteristics of the verb. I think the best place to look for an answer to
this is in the semantic structure at the phrase and clause level or above.
Clay
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
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