Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Matthew Longhorn
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Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

I was hoping someone could point me to work similar to Andrason and Locatell's work on the perfect tense form for the other tense forms.
http://bagl.org/files/volume5/BAGL_5-1_ ... catell.pdf
Given that I have so far been fairly convinced by Porter on issues of verbal aspect and issues relating to tense forms I am changing in my views. I think largely because I have spent so much time reading work on relevance theory I am appreciating more cognitively orientated approaches. While I haven't finished this paper yet, it makes a lot of sense and the approach is one I am interested in reading more on. At the moment I am not looking to get into general cognitive linguistics but rather just that applied to Greek
MAubrey
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by MAubrey »

A number of the essays in the Greek verb Revisited fall into this domain.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

Thanks Mike. I have that but haven’t been back to it for a while. I definitely benefited from your wife’s work on middle semantics.
Will go back and have another look now that I have this interest.
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Contra Porter, Andrason et al. do not look for a single meaning that characterises the perfect, but argue that it can take one of various senses along a grammaticalisation cline. Broadly speaking and without delving into the specific details, I would endorse such an approach. The hard part is, and where Andrason tends to be weak, figuring out which of the various way stations for a perfect a particular instance is, or identifying actual ambiguity.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

Hi Stephen, yes - I noted their departure from Porter. I was noting that whilst I started out in the Porter camp I seem to be moving away from it.
I also agree that there is a difficulty with identifying what interpretation should be selected is going to be an issue, but I think that this is the case for all of natural language. I am happy to know that there are interpretive options available without holding much hope for a final answer on exegetical matters. Not suggesting you think otherwise
Given the view of language being interpreted online and rapidly in normal discourse I think that ambiguity is natural unless the author makes deliberate steps to clarify / be more explicit
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Do you think that cognitive approaches will make the aspect debates we used to have obsolete? It feels like a lot of people I respect just aren't talking about these things that way anymore.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

Bear in mind that I am an uneducated amateur but I would say no. I do however think that perhaps the importance of it has been overplayed possibly because of the heat of some of the debate. We can focus too much on assigning hard values to things when in reality I am coming to believe that even lexical meanings are highly subjective and content dependent, why would grammatical or aspectual be different?
Understanding a aspectual values is important, however, but I don’t know that we can necessarily believe that an author adehered to their base meanings in all instances. Without having access to native speakers it is important to keep (prototypical?) aspectual values in mind, as otherwise it all becomes a bit of a grab bag. Given that my own language is not a aspect prominent one it is also helpful to keep aspectual prominence in mind as well due to issues of tense that may differ from English

Possibly talking nonsense, but they are my thoughts
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: August 27th, 2018, 8:06 am Do you think that cognitive approaches will make the aspect debates we used to have obsolete? It feels like a lot of people I respect just aren't talking about these things that way anymore.
I don't think cognitive approaches are necessary to that, and I'm not even what specific contribution the cognitive linguists make to aspect studies. Aspect is already greatly and well studied by linguistics, though I don't think it is getting the same attention it used to. The "aspect debates we used to have" have been largely generated by Stan Porter and his school, and, to follow Kuhn, it will not fade away until that school stops publishing on it.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by RandallButh »

and I'm not even what specific contribution the cognitive linguists make to aspect studies
I think that the poster may have been thinking that cognitive linguistics undermines the one and only supporting piece for "aspect only" people.
Aspect-only practitioners argue that meaning must be consistent, not-contradicted. So if a present tense is ever used in the past, then it cannot be a present tense. Cognitive linguistics would treat such an approach as inherently brittle and artificial. It is not how human beings use and construct languages. As soon as a person allows for rhetorical devices with language systems, (and cognitive approaches expect all sorts of complications and mappings within a small finite system) then nothing is left for the aspect-only NT school. (I say NT school because I do not know any classicists who are 'aspect only'. And all the Greeks that I know either alive or through their writings, now and in antiquity, recognized time as included in the Greek verb.
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Re: Similar work to Andrason and Locatell - Perfect Wave

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

I think that it perhaps goes wider than just removing the aspect only position. For example, just as cross linguistic work such as that referred to by Locatell and andrasson shows grammaticalisation paths there are also lexicalisation paths. Relevance theory’s proposed pragmatic processes such as broadening/narrowing, category extension etc shows that monosemy can develop into polysemy over time. If both grammaticalised meaning and lexicalised meaning can shift based on pragmatic processes to new lexical values, why can’t aspectual meanings.
I don’t know how such a development would look, but I would be interested in reading studies on modern languages that are aspectually prominent to see whether over time the perfective / imperfective distinction blurs and how.
Similarly, if we accept the fact that language can be messy - even without modern cross linguistic study we should expect that an authors subjective portrayal of an event (either internally temporally unfolding or not) may not fit nearly into our definitional boxes. That has a direct impact on discourse analysis.

I guess that another route of investigation would be to focus more on the experimental pragmatic side of life as Noveck does. This could help, through modern languages, to assess how aspectual meaning helps a hearer to process the information and trigger different cognitive effects. This largely sits with discourse analysis, but cognitive linguistics could play into that area giving more grounding.
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