That's a fair point, depending on the dating, it could be, though I'm inclined to view that shift as happening at least century or two later into the Byzantine period. Alternatively, I might be inclined to view this as involving the perfect to aorist shift in process, but not yet completed. That is, however we analyze this perfect here, it is precisely this kind of usage that motivated the death of the perfect and its "merger" with the aorist.cwconrad wrote: Considering the questionable dating of this Greek text (it really is questionable, isn't it? How old, in fact, is the Greek text here cited?) couldn't these perfect-tense forms (apart from the ptc. εἰδυῖα, of course), be understood as aorists?
Well, I never would have used that particular word if its nominal form hadn't already been used. Category confusion is precisely what came to my mind when you used the term "aorist" and apparently, we both misunderstood each other.Stephen Carlson wrote: Yeah, I had no idea what it meant for a state of affairs to be aoristic. That seemed to be a category confusion.
Agreed.Stephen Carlson wrote:I'm getting concerned that the literature we've read on the perfect is fairly disjoint.
At least in his 2004 article, Haug only talks about experiential perfects with reference to English, not Greek--with the exception of page 412 where he only treats as a possibiltiy that he then rejects. And rightly so. And most of the literature dealing with English perfects is irrelevant at best. I read several thousand pages of it a year and a half ago and tossed 95% of it. That was a waste of time.Stephen Carlson wrote:Experiential (and "universal") are fairly common terms in the literature on the perfect outside of Greek (and have been applied to Greek, too: Bentein, Haug, Gerö-von Stechow, etc.). For me, Rijksbaron's discussion of the perfect γέγραφα clearly corresponds to the experiential perfect. Yes, it's not in Wallace, Fanning, Porter, etc., but I don't find their treatments coherent.
I'd be interested in a fuller expression of what you're saying here. As it stands, I overwhelmingly disagree.Stephen Carlson wrote:I don't have a problem with considering both ἐξουθένηκα and γέγραφα experiential. It's a reading of the perfect that's generally available but it only becomes relevant when the resultative perfect (Haug's target state?) is not available. I haven't found situation type to be that helpful for understanding the different functions of the perfect--not as helpful as diathesis, at least.
I'm perfectly open to that being the case. But I'm yet to see evidence that demonstrates that one way or the other. There are too few state verbs that take perfects in the Koine to begin with and those that do exist are essentially useless for proving anything. The fact that Haug says that and Gerö and von Stechow say that is great. Great and useless.Stephen Carlson wrote:I'm basically agreed on the continuity of the system between the Classical period and Koine, but Homer is pre-Classical. Haug's article certainly refers to it as a Homeric usage, and he even complains of conflation of the Homeric usage with later uses by some grammarians. I think that Gerö and von Stechow say the same. (I wonder if both are dependent on Chantraine or Wackernagel for this observation.)MAubrey wrote:Why? Clearly Rijksbaron view it as existing in the Classical period. Is there a particular reason you diverge from that? As far as I can see, the system hasn't really changed from between the Classical period and the Koine...
Just not decent enough that we can agree with each other either in the right categories, the meaning of those categories, or in how to interpret the secondary literature (its far less cohesive than you seem to want it to be). I do get the feeling that our starting points as so different that we're just not understanding the other. Your actual explication of how your categories relate to each other finally makes more sense of what you're saying now. But I wouldn't present the typology or the categories like that. I think it lumps where should split and splits where it should lump. Bhat's concept of perfective/imperfective idea of the perfect does not sit as neatly with the model of Bybee et al. as you want it to either. There is nothing imperfective about (what you are calling) stative perfects.Stephen Carlson wrote:We've had a decent theory of the perfect outside of Greek since the 1970s and, in my view, it transfers pretty well to Greek.
Does anyone have anything other than a "gut feeling" or intuition for why their interpretation of ἐξουθένηκα should be preferred? Otherwise, I'm not sure there's much else to say here, though I'd really enjoy picking up this discussion of the nature of the perfect in the Grammar/Syntax forum.