Verbal Aspect

I'm currently taking biblical Greek at seminary and we are using Mounce's BBG textbook. We just started looking at verbs and Mounce mentions the concept of "aspect." He uses the terms "continuous" (an ongoing process) and undefined (simple event) and another called "perfective."

I don't see aspect listed with verbs in the exegetical guide and was wondering why its not shown. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for the help on this.

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Pastor Dave Thomas

my understanding is that aspect is hardcoded into tense. Since the morphological tagging indicates tense, it is up to the student to determine if tense addresses time and/or aspect and then make the appropriate hermeneutical choices.

unfortunately, this bundle has not been broken up into smaller (affordable) resources. - https://www.logos.com/product/32713/zondervan-biblical-languages-collection Constantine Campbell's "Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek" was used in my Greek classes.

Lee

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/542553#Comment_542553

Mounce doesn't use the term "tense" in its usual linguistic sense of a form or marker to reference a verb in time.

For pedagogical reasons, he mainly uses "tense" only in the barest sense of different forms of the verb. I think he is doing this to try and reduce the beginning learner's struggle of tense vs aspect, which for many takes a while to process.

Aspect is a concept that has really come into focus in the last couple of decades or so. Many guides and commentaries do not say too much about it. I'm sure the situation will change eventually.

Donnie Hale

For what it's worth, Logos' own Steve Runge has been discussing aspect on his web site: http://www.ntdiscourse.org/ . See especially this article and the links in it:

http://www.ntdiscourse.org/2013/08/porters-use-of-contrastive-substitution/

Donnie

Lee

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/542694#Comment_542694

Thanks for posting that. Yep, that's a balanced corrective.