Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan AT texcel.no>]

At 08:08 AM 1/5/99 -0800, Ken Litwak wrote:

>I have only two questions for you Yochanan. Have you read Olsen's
>dissertation?  Have you read any of the works by Stanley Porter and
>others that discuss the issue of whether the Aorist in Greek is temoral
>or aspectual?  If not, then you are too inadequately infomred to
>critique the view you are arguing against.  There's a growign mass of
>literature in this regard, and I suggest thatyou read it first. It's of
>interest here because the understanding of tense by the LXX transaltors
>may tell us something about their understanding of Hebrew tenses.  
 
I know almost nothing about Hebrew, but I do know something about Greek,
aspect, and Mari Olsen's methods, so I'll jump in here briefly.

Mari Olsen gives objective ways to test whether tense is present in a
grammatical form. To understand this, I think you need a little more detail
than Rolf provided. Her methods are indeed based on Grice's distinction
between semantic and pragmatic implicature, but she uses this very
creatively, and unless you know both Grice and Olsen, you may have a hard
time understanding how she means that.

Grice was a philosopher who explored, among other things, the distinction
between things that are explicitly stated (semantic implicature) and things
that are implied (pragmatic implicature). He believed that most
communication is implied rather than stated. For instance, consider the
following conversation:

(Man walks up to your door with a gas can.)
Man: Excuse me, but I've got a problem...
You: There's a gas station around the corner, over there.

Think about what has been communicated here. You assumed that the man ran
out of gas, and needs to buy gas, so you told him where to find a gas
station. Situational cues implied that this was what was going on, but none
of this was ever stated. The man assumes that there is no gas station
closer than the one you pointed to, that you believe this gas station has
not gone out of business, and that the station you mentioned is likely to
be open.

Grice also observed that those things that are explicitly stated can not be
contradicted without producing a sentence native speakers find distinctly odd:

** "There's a gas station around the corner, but there's no gas station
there."

On the other hand, those things that are implied rather than stated can be
contradicted:

"There's a gas station around the corner, but I don't think it is open."


Mari Olsen suggests that verb forms may convey time or aspect or both. It
is also possible for a tense to *imply* time without explicitly stating it.
If time is implied rather than stated, it may be contradicted. The same is
true for aspect.

Olsen's conclusion on the Greek Aorist is not that it does not convey time
in the indicative, but that time is *implied* rather than *stated*. She
concludes that the Greek Imperfect states both time and aspect, and that
the Aorist states aspect but merely implies time.

I think Mari's work is extremely helpful as a way of establishing an
empirical methodology for examining tense and aspect, and I have used it a
lot in trying to understand the Greek tenses. Looking at the examples she
used, it is possible to come to different conclusions about these two
tenses by using the same wonderful methodology, depending on how a few
specific passages are interpreted. And I've talked with Mari enough to know
that she regards the methodology as her important contribution, not the
specific conclusions she has reached about each Greek tense.

My take: her methodology is wonderful, and her take on the Greek tenses is
a reasonable one, but not the only reasonable one. She doesn't talk about
Hebrew. 

She does, however, talk about English and Mandarin and a bunch of other
languages, which makes it extremely valuable for those of us who haven't
done enough thinking about tense and aspect in our own languages.

Jonathan
 
jonathan AT texcel.no
Texcel Research
http://www.texcel.no