David Yoon on the Perfect Tense - 1 Cor 7:14

[Matthew Longhorn]

Another weigh in on the perfect tense form - this time by David I. Yoon from McMaster, coming down on the side of stative aspect. Just got flagged by my google alerts

https://www.bskorea.or.kr/data/pdf/46-1 ... 0Yoon).pdf

Of interest it references the semi-mythical notion of a volume from Peter Lang based off the 2013 conferene with Buist Fanning, Stanley Porter and Constantine Campbell... I would love to see this come out, but I have heard about it for so many years now I am beginning to think it is a literary unicorn!

[serunge]

Having heard the papers in person, there is not much new that comes out aside from some of Fanning’s (re)assessments. The book will also be boring because it won’t have Randall’s performance-art question. Nor will it include the other alternative (see GVR) that we made three steering committee members aware of, but they disallowed since it had not been published in a monograph.

It’s hard not to be dismissive when scholars opt to rehash an argument in an older, simpler form (the good old days of P-F-C) when there were a couple hundred pages of relevant content that followed Fanning’s article in GVR. Why not break new ground by testing—really engaging and not just strawmanning—the actual state of the question? Nope.

[Matthew Longhorn]

It’s hard not to be dismissive when scholars opt to rehash an argument in an older, simpler form (the good old days of P-F-C) when there were a couple hundred pages of relevant content that followed Fanning’s article in GVR. Why not break new ground by testing—really engaging and not just strawmanning—the actual state of the question? Nope.

I haven’t read the article from Yoon yet - enjoying a day with non-Greek material for once (Please don’t judge me)!I read the intro and the conclusion and left it for a future read. I am feeling a bit troubled by my now instinctive doubt when I see papers on verbal aspect and the author is a McMaster Phd and am slightly worried that I am likely to have a biased reading. Will definitely look out with interest to see if I can spot the straw manning you mention when I give it a read though. Hopefully it will show whether I understand the positions properly.

[serunge]

A couple clarifications. Do not take Dave as representative of all MacDiv scholars. There are the true believers, and there are those like Francis Pang, Christopher Land, and Cindy Westfall. I’ll leave it there. And the strawmanning I was referencing was what little engagement of GVR there’s been, mainly at Domain Thiry-Three.

It’s worth a read if you’re interested in seeing how he applies linguistics. It’s featured in the intro, but not in his critiques of Campbell’s and Fanning’s purported application to the passage. The arguments are based on Pauline theology about sanctification, not change-of-state, telicity, or voice (both verbs are middle/passive, so stative is to be expected). A better argument that more throughly engages opposing views and still arrives at similar conclusions about state it’s could be had using Aubrey, Crellin and Thomson, IMO. It was a missed opportunity.

[Matthew Longhorn]

Thanks for the clarifications, and the useful distinctions

[Matthew Longhorn]

Have you read Porter's review in FNT / have any thoughts?
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E6W ... ed&f=false

I am aware I ask for other people's thoughts a lot rather than doing the hard work myself. Apologies if that is annoying - as a dabbler in Greek I tend to do a lot of downloading and cataloging of material and have learned that there is a LOT i don't know still. asking opinions at least gives me different views to reference when considering things

[MAubrey]

Have you read Porter's review in FNT / have any thoughts?
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E6W ... ed&f=false

I am aware I ask for other people's thoughts a lot rather than doing the hard work myself. Apologies if that is annoying - as a dabbler in Greek I tend to do a lot of downloading and cataloging of material and have learned that there is a LOT i don't know still. asking opinions at least gives me different views to reference when considering things

This review is, more or less, his paper from the SBL panel session for GVR, I believe. It's a been a while since I looked at it.

[nathaniel j. erickson]

Have you read Porter's review in FNT / have any thoughts?
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E6W ... ed&f=false

A few big-picture thoughts:
1. Of course, many of his points are obviously true. Greek Verb Revisited is more like a coalition of voices approaching the issue from a set of loosely shared convictions, a strong one of which is that Porter's approach is wrong. So, is it disjointed and uneven? Of course. But, it does presented a united front in challenging the sort of "linguistic hegemony" of Porter in NT Greek studies.

2. Speaking of Porter's "linguistic hegemony" in NT Greek, one of the things which has intrigued me is that I have failed to find people outside NT Greek who are doing anything like what he and his "school" do, in terms of the verb system. I'm willing to be shown otherwise, but in my experience people doing linguistic-oriented studies of the verb outside of NT Greek are not understanding it in a way analogous to Porter's approach. At the very least, Greek Verb Revisted puts a lot more linguistic-oriented approaches on the menu for NT Greek students, showing that "the linguistic approach" to describing NT Greek (really, Koine Greek) does not inherently equal Porter's approach.

3. I tire of the way humanities oriented scholars appropriate Thomas Kuhn's work. Aside from the fact that his legacy is disputed, there is conceptual slippage in adopting his work aimed at describing physics and the "hard sciences" to things like the the study of language. The paradigmatic paradigm shift is a great example. Physicists once explained the universe in terms of Newtonian physics; now they describe it in terms of Einsteinian (or 'quatum') physics. Paradigm shift. The whole way of seeing things has changed and the standard for describing what is right and wrong, what is worth studying, etc. have all change. Or have they?

If you want to calculate the amount of fuel necessary to fly from New York to L.A., you don't both with pondering what the likelihood is of the sub-atomic particals in your fuel popping in and out of existence, you just punch some numbers into good ole' fashioned Newtonian Physics equations and voila. Problem solved. The basic point, so often missed by those appropriating the argument in humanities discusssions, and I would lump Porter's use in this article here, is that the paradigm shift has changed things, but it depends a great deal on what you are looking at. We launch satellites across the solar system using Newtonian physics; we try to describe the nature of atoms and black holes using Einsteinian physics. Both are still valid. The paradigm shift has not resulted in a rejection of everything from the past, or a disallowing of those approaches for accurate descriptions. I trust the application to the "linguistic-oriented" study of Greek is evident. Is verbal aspect a "paradigm shift"? Yes, I suppose so (a cynical answer to this question would point out that it often simply buries old problems under new terminology; that is, cynically speaking, the true nature of a paradigm shift). But that certainly does not rule out the real value of other approaches to the same issues. Pleading "Kuhnian shift" as part of an argument, and then judging the value of the contributions of others based on where you place them on your "Kuhnian shift" scale seems to me to be a misguided way of arguing. Everyone is trying to understand the same data. Saying someone is wrong because their interpretation happens to line up with how people understood things before "the great paradigm shift" is not really making an argument.

[nathaniel j. erickson]

One final thought on Kuhnian "paradigm shifts" and Porter's review (for the record, I think he has many fair points in the brief article; any short review of a multi-authored work of the scope of Greek Verb Revisited will necessarily have to be light on specific disagreements and arguments).

Porter's use of paradigm shift seems to rhetorically obfuscate the nature of the debate in his favor. He positions the field as though his take is correct and his interlocutors simply haven't yet seen the light, because their views are unclear with regard to the paradigm shift. Naturally, Porter is convinced his understanding is right, so it is unsurprising that he positions the field this way. The problem, though, is that the exact nature of the paradigm shift is the very point under debate! No one in Greek Verb Revisited is arguing to jettison an aspect-prominent view. Indeed, an aspect-prominent description of the Greek verbal system is the actual paradigm shift. However, the debate is whether the tenseless indicative and Porter's handling of the perfect are justified. Representing things in a way that implies these points are part of the paradigm shift is disingenuous. A great many scholars, both specialists on the issue and not, disagree with Porter's take on those issues. And the disagreement is not motivated by rejecting the paradigm shift, but by arguing that the "paradigm shift" a la Porter is wrong on a few issues.

Anyway, perhaps I have beat my "be careful when using the Kuhnian paradigm shift argument" drum enough.

[Stirling Bartholomew]

... a cynical answer to this question would point out that it often simply buries old problems under new terminology; that is, cynically speaking, the true nature of a paradigm shift

Many moons ago as an undergraduate I was up in my eyebrows in behavioral science. The frameworks had a short shelf life. It is hard to understand why students of biblical language are still learning frameworks from the 1980s because that is really old stuff. Becoming a devote attached to a dead framework limits what you are able to see. The gird acts as a filter. It keeps you from perceiving patterns and relationships outside your current schema.

Today and yesterday I looked at [ἐν] [τῷ] κόσμῳ several hundred samples from Philo, Gregory Nyssa, Basil, Athanasius. I didn't know what I was looking for just looked for patterns. I have a few ideas not well formed. Not going to share them.


If you study works by E.A. Nida, J.P. Louw or R.E. Longacre you will discover they used multiple frameworks. I hesitate to mention S. Levinsohn, I studied him for several years and didn't detect any framework. I have read some M.A.K Halliday and found him helpful. Nothing to do with SFL as it is practiced elsewhere. My point of origin in linguistics was pre-Chomsky transformational grammar. I am looking for something after cognitive approaches. I found out how old those ideas were browsing the shelves of the advanced technology library where I worked. Some of that stuff dates back to the 1960s cold war research.