Campbell: Advances Chapter 5

Post Reply
Paul-Nitz
Posts: 497
Joined: June 1st, 2011, 4:19 am
Location: Sussex, Wisconsin

Campbell: Advances Chapter 5

Post by Paul-Nitz »

This thread is for discussing Con Campbell's book, Advances in the Study of Greek (2015) Chapter Five:
“Verbal Aspect and Aktionsart”


Interesting to learn that at one time people thought there was TENSE in the non-indicative moods. Is that where we get the atrocious terms like "Present Subjunctive"?

The chapter gives strong encouragement to learn more from Campell’s book, Basics of Verbal Aspect.

From reading that book, various other papers, and this Chapter 5, I've gained little to help me understand aspect better or be able to teach it better to my students. Luckily, I’m deluded. I think I understand aspect pretty well and know how to teach it, so the whole issue isn’t terribly interesting to me. I'll keep the door open an inch or so to let in some future clear and convincing explanation of aspect come in, but only an inch. I'm especially hard pressed to give up the idea of the indicative not indicating any sort of tense. Just seems very hard to swallow.

Seems to me that the desire to be too specific in terms and definitions has led to a controversy and conclusions that are ultimately unhelpful in understanding the Greek verb.

There is a nice little section in this chapter about aspect and narrative.
Paul D. Nitz - Lilongwe Malawi
MAubrey
Posts: 1090
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 8:52 pm
Contact:

Re: Campbell: Advances Chapter 5

Post by MAubrey »

Paul-Nitz wrote:Interesting to learn that at one time people thought there was TENSE in the non-indicative moods.
Con (and others) likes making this claim. To the best of my knowledge he's never cited anyone that demonstrates it to be the case.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Campbell: Advances Chapter 5

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Paul-Nitz wrote:I'm especially hard pressed to give up the idea of the indicative not indicating any sort of tense. Just seems very hard to swallow.
If I understand Campbell correctly, he does have something corresponding to "tense": he just calls it "remoteness". I'm not convinced it is much more than a notional difference in terminology. He argues the spatial metaphor makes the category as a whole easier to understand for all its varied uses rather than treating the augmented forms as a fake-tense in counterfactuals. On this model, the past can be thought of as "remote in time," and the irrealis as "remote in reality" or some such.

In my opinion, this really the monosemy-polysemy debate applied to remoteness/tense. The problem with a monosemy approach is that the basic meaning it proposes is so abstract that, in its attempt to cover all the use cases, it can become over-inclusive and there really is no principled way to account for them that is less complex than polysemy. Most notably for Campbell's remoteness, the augmented forms are never applied to remoteness in space, which is exactly contrary to what the spatiality of Campbell's concept would call for. The irony is that, while in the tense approach the counterfactual use of the imperfect is not a true past, in the remoteness approach, none of the uses are truly (spatially) remote.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Barry Hofstetter
Posts: 2159
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 1:48 pm

Re: Campbell: Advances Chapter 5

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Paul-Nitz wrote:This thread is for discussing Con Campbell's book, Advances in the Study of Greek (2015) Chapter Five:
“Verbal Aspect and Aktionsart”


Interesting to learn that at one time people thought there was TENSE in the non-indicative moods. Is that where we get the atrocious terms like "Present Subjunctive"?
Actually, no. It's traditionally called the present subjunctive because it derives from the present stem (the first principal part) of the verb, just as the aorist subjunctive derives from the aorist stem, the third principal part...
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Campbell: Advances Chapter 5

Post by Stephen Carlson »

This chapter was about what I expected from Campbell. It gives a good sense of who the players (including himself) are in the NT field with brief descriptions. As expected, it ends up recapitulating his view of the field.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Post Reply

Return to “Campbell: Advances in the Study of Greek”