[b-greek] Re: Mk 10:20 aspectology

From: CWestf5155@aol.com
Date: Tue Aug 29 2000 - 15:36:51 EDT


In a message dated 08/29/2000 12:30:31 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net writes:

> In Mark 10:20 we read:
>
> hO DE EFH AUTWi DIDSKALE, TAUTA PANTA
> EFULAXAMHN EK NEOTHTOS MOU.
>
> Now I would expect one of the latter-day proponents of aspectology to raise
> the question why do see the form EFULAXAMHN here? Is this question worth
> exploring?
>
> The word group FULASSW, FULASSOMAI has semantic properties (see L&N below)
> which override the morphological tense/aspect marking. I would conclude
from
> this that getting preoccupied with the tense/aspect marking of EFULAXAMHN
in
> this context is chasing phantoms. Looking for something that isn't there.
> The primary contribution that EFULAXAMHN makes to this context is found in
> the domain of lexical semantics, not tense/aspect marking.
>
Clay,

I've broken through me bonds and gags temporarily.

This is funny, because this is exactly where aspect works. The Aorist is
used here because the speaker wishes to state a fact/event/state of affairs
without any further dressing--"the user of Greek wishes to depict an action
as a complete and undifferentiated process." (Porter, "Idioms of the Greek
NT", p. 35).

I figured this out without the arrival of phantoms, without breaking a sweat,
and well before my oatmeal finished cooking.

I think that going through all those traditional categories to find just the
right label takes more time, and all the while I'd be fretting about why this
looks like a contradiction of what I perceived to be the Aorist's meaning.
And when I got it properly labelled, I would still be uncomfortable.

It works for me.

> This leads me to one of my basic disagreements with Systemic Functional
> Linguistics. The idea that every low level language feature is a matter of
> "choice" and therefore represents some sort of authorial intent. I don't
buy
> this at all. I think that a lot of low level language features (e.g.
> tense/aspect) are simply conventions of a most mundane sort which tell us
> little or nothing about what the author is saying. Getting preoccupied with
> them is like standing in the Art Institute of Chicago with your nose three
> inches from a Cezanne looking at the texture of the canvas. You aren't
going
> to make any sense out of cubism from three inches away.

Well, Systemic Linguistics doesn't think that everything is a choice. The
principle is: when there is no choice, there is no formal significance--no
semantic load with the form. And SL recognizes linguistic phenomena such as
idioms and collocation--virtually no choice there. However, when there is a
choice, then in that case the choice has meaning (and I'll go on record to
say this is true for lexis too, though lexis doesn't involve a system like
the verbal system).

I think part of our problem is that aspect has assumed monstrous proportions
way out of perspective with the role it plays. Aspect is not the key to
understanding Greek--it is one of many many things that convey meaning. The
clearer I get on it, the less I focus on it--it is only one of the diverse
tools that I use when doing hermeneutics.

Cindy Westfall
PhD Student, Roehampton


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