Aspectology, Related Issues, and the Greek Verb
The Ancient Greek verbal system has been subjected to the scrutiny of scholars for over 2,500 years, but is still in many respects little understood. This state of affairs has been clarified in recent times by the work of Porter and Fanning on the verb in the New Testament (NT). Accordingly, this chapter sets out the theoretical basis of its own approach to the Greek verb with reference to developments in modern aspectology and especially to Porter and Fanning's contributions. According to the approach adopted here, ancient Greek manifests two aspects, perfective and imperfective, and as many as five aspectual tenses: present, imperfect, aorist, perfect, and pluperfect. The future and future perfect are taken as the only non-aspectual tense forms, but from the later Koine period, the future comes to be replaced by aspectual periphrases.
Keywords: verbal aspect, grammatical marking, perfect tense, Greek grammar, S. E. Porter, B. M. Fanning
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .