ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

That’s the title of an article in Filología Neotestamentaria 19 (2006).

The full title is:

IS VERBAL ASPECT A PROMINENCE INDICATOR? AN EVALUATION OF STANLEY PORTER’S PROPOSAL WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

The article is an incredibly important critique of Stanley Porter’s approach to Aspect & its relationship to Discourse Analysis. Its not something I’ve written on here before, but it should perhaps go without saying (since I’m linking to the article) that I find the author Jody Barnard’s analysis and criticism to be highly enlightening and important and he’s quite critical of Porter.

If you’ve been following the Aspect debate (please stop calling it “Aspect Theory” – its not a theory its a semantic feature expressed morphosyntactically), you’ll want to read this article.

It doesn’t get deeply into the question of how many Aspects there are or into Aktionsart, the main focus is the flaws with Porter’s proposals regarding Aspect and Discourse Analysis (specifically, foreground/background/frontground).

The PDF itself is HERE.

Another important book that we’ll never be able to afford:

Discourse Cohesion in Ancient Greek Edited by S.J. Bakker and G.C. Wakker

Central in this volume of the 6th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics is the question how cohesion is created in Ancient Greek texts. The contributions to the volume either discuss the various cohesive devices that occur in a specific text or focus on the use and function of a particular cohesion device in a larger corpus. Apart from the use of pronomina and particles, less standard cohesive devices, like the use of tense and the grammatical form of complements, are taken into consideration. The result is a volume that gives a good impression of recent research in the field of Greek linguistics, not only of interest for classical scholars, but also for general linguists interested in discourse coherence cnd cohesion.

Contributors include: Rutger J. Allan, Stéphanie J. Bakker, Louis Basset, Anna Bonifazi, Annemieke Drummen, Marietje (A.M.) van Erp Taalman Kip, Coulter H. George, Luuk Huitink, Sander Orriens, Annemieke van der Plaat, Antonio Revuelta, Albert Rijksbaron and Gerry C. Wakker.

No, this post isn’t going to provide a comparison of how word order in Classical Greek differs from that of Koine Greek. Rather, I want to compare how such studies have been done in Classical Greek and Koine, specifically with regard to their use of statistics:

Ivan Shing Chung Kwong, in his study of word order in Luke writes the following:

The statistical result of the study contributes to the figure of relative positions between the three main constituents in two aspects: unmarked word order patterns and tendencies of certain word order patterns–a very high percentage of occurrences of a certain word order pattern indicates an unmarked order (a very regular/typical order patter, e.g., subject precedes the complement in a clause [as stated below]); as relatively high percentage of occurrences of a certain word order pattern indicates a certain degree of tendency of having such a word order (the percentage of a certain pattern is not as high as the unmarked ones, but it is still relatively high to demonstrate a certain degree of tendency of having such a word order pattern, e.g., subject tends to precede its  predicate in independent clauses [as stated below]).

The Word Order of the Gospel of Luke: It’s Forgrounded Messages, Page 45.

Now compare that with what Helma Dik says in her first book on Greek word order in Herodotus:

We have seen 48 instances in this section, many of which discussed in the previous sections of this chapter. Throughout, I have refrained from giving any statistics of the ordering patterns found, mainly because I do not think that statistics on the order of, for instance, the three core constituents would be very illuminating. In any case, the number of instances examined here is so small, that we cannot even expect ‘significant’ results in the technical sense. Be that as it may, Table 4.1 presents the distribution over the various ordering patterns as introduced in section 4.1.

Table 4.1 Ordering patterns with two arguments expressed

Pattern	Instances	Total
A1-A2-P	1.66.3; 1.188.1; 4.160.2; 6.7	4
A2-A1-P	3.1.1	1
A1-P-A2	1.161; 3.25.2; 4.173; 5.14.2; 6.28.1; 6.108.4 [3.19.3; 3.52.7; 3.151.1; 4.80.2]	6 [4]
A2-P-A1	3.44.1	1
P-A1-A2	1.73.1; 3.47.1	2
P-A2-A1	1.166.1	1

What conclusions can we draw from this distribution? At first sight A1-P-A2 [e.g. Subject-V-Object] appears to be the preferred pattern. If we include 3.19.3, 3.52.7, 3.151.1, and 4.80.2, this pattern covers more than half of the total number of instances. Does this make A1-P-A2 the unmarked order and should we proceed to consider only the marked instances? Clearly this would be a complicated procedure; with five different ‘marked’ patterns, there is a lot left to explain. In the preceding chapter I have tired to show an alternative way of handling the data. From this it appears that we need not describe one pattern as the preferred or unmarked pattern, but that differences in pragmatic function assignment can account for the different orderings. In such a description, we would not regard A1-P-A2 as unmarked, but explain its frequency from the fact that it is often the first argument that has Topic function and, therefore, ends up in initial position, and that in continuous narrative the predicate is the primary candidate for Focus function. Ironically, if we wanted to describe one pattern as unmarked in this description, it would be P-A1-A2, for it is very simple to describe the five other patterns in terms of ‘deviations’ (resulting from pragmatic function assignment) from this pattern.

In the clauses in which only one argument is present, we can see a similar phenomenon. A1-P is the ‘statistically unmarked’ option; I have argued that in A1-P the first argument is pragmatically marked.

Word Order in Ancient Greek: A Pragmatic Account of Word Order Variation in Herodotus, Page 93-4.

And now for my commentary on these two discussions.

First of all, Kwong and Dik’s perspectives are polar opposites.

Secondly, the quote from Kwong above is a single long and cumbrous sentence that really gets under my skin.

Third (and to the point), Dik is highly critical of the sort of statistics that Kwong has based his entire study upon. In light of her statements on statistics, Kwong’s literature review comments about Dik are rather striking:

The method and approach of Dik’s work is strange and largely disappointing. . . . Dik’s attempt to study the area pragmatically on the theory of Topic and Focus is a good try, but she fails to have a reasonable methodology and thus her work cannot give a satisfactory figure on Herodotus’ pragmatic word order (Kwong, 20; you can look up this page on Google Books if you’d like).

A couple thoughts on these words. I truly find them to be incredible. The Bryn Mawr review of Dik’s first book was incredibly positive – the exact opposite of Kwong. The only explanation I can think of consists of a combination of Kwong simply not understanding Dik with the extremely high value that he places on statistics in his own study (the few books that he speaks positively of in his lit review tend to be statistical). The vast expanse between the two approaches, one statistical and the other wholly pragmatic seems to have also introduced a gap in comprehension.

Personally, and this is my opinion (of course, I consider my opinion is correct, but am willing to be convinced otherwise), I think that Dik’s approach does far more justice to the data itself and is significantly closer to reality for Greek word order. In the end, Kwong’s work on word order will be viewed as idiosyncratic, which is unfortunate, because there is some good stuff in the book, particularly on semantic chaining (there’s also some good discussion of Topic change in chapter 8). He is simply too dependent upon statistics to be the last word, especially considering that word order statistics often vary from author to author and even from book to book within an author. I’d be curious as to whether Kwong’s word order proposals in Luke’s Gospel also work for Acts. I haven’t checked, but I’m a bit cynical.

With all of that said, there is also some strength in his exegetical claims, but I think that has more to do with how he relates his statistical findings to other linguistic/grammatical factors within the text than it does with any sort of true discovery about word order.

As for Dik, she doesn’t have everything right either. Her basic paradigm is fine, though perhaps too simple(i.e. constituents follow the order: Topic, Focus, Predicate, everything else), but at least in her 1995 book, she introduces some unusual perspectives. I’m suspicious about her claim that Verbs can be Pragmatic Topics, which is a unique distinction from typical Functional Grammar (and in every other framework I’ve read on this subject). As for the issue of simplicity, her explanations of discontinuous constituents needs some nuancing, in my view. This is also true for constituents that follow the Verb, which are generally relegated to the category, “everything else.” I think there’s more structure following the verb than that. At times, she seems to want everything to be explained via pragmatics rather than other components of Grammar. If that is the case (and I hope its not), then eventually she’ll be in the same place that Chomsky got himself into by trying to make everything about syntax. Of course, this is less of an issue at the level of constituents and grammatical relations than it is within individual phrases. And her focus in this particular book generally stays above the phrase level.

But at least Dik is aware of the problems and dangers of overdependence upon statistics, which Kwong almost seems to embrace with open arms. Also her focus is on looking at word order as a discourse level phenomenon, while Kwong is entirely focused upon the sentence (again, but differently than Dik, kind of like Chomsky). I suspect that this is the cause of Kwong’s misreading of Dik. At least, that’s my working hypothesis.

So there are some reflections on two very different books on the same topic. I hope I haven’t bored you all to death yet.

This won’t be long, but a few people asked for it and its worth writing about in any case, I suppose.

1. David Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (The Language Library).
   Now I know that this book looks expensive. But the secret of it is two fold: 1) Get the paperback. 2) Get the previous edition. I actually have the 1991 edition and its suits me just fine. Its answered all my questions when I’ve come across terminology I didn’t know. The strength of the book is that it is framework independent and generally does a fantastic job at explaining how different people and frameworks have used the same words for different things. That’s often a lifesaver when it comes to reading book from different perspectives (cf. also the SIL Glossary)
2. Paul Kroeger’s Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).
   This is a great little book and an excellent introduction to syntax and morphology. The book’s goals are practical – How do you do morphological analysis? How do you do syntactic analysis? Its generative, but its not Chomskyan, so there are not deep structures or anything like that. In general, there is very little framework/theory specific claims. You only analyze the actual sentence form. You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but for some reason, Chomsky made it so it isn’t. Can anyone say, “Unnecessarily complicated”? Anyway, this book doesn’t do that. The book has exercises for practicing, too, from a variety of languages, if you wanted to practice what it teaches. With that said, the book doesn’t do anything with pragmatics or more complicated morphology – two features that are well represented in Greek. But even still, its provides an excellent foundation for more detailed study of morphology and syntax. And its greatest strength is its provision of a method for analysis.
3. P. H. Matthews’ Morphology (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics) 2nd Edition.
   Basically, what Kroeger’s book doesn’t say about morphology, Matthews’ does. And more importantly for those of us studying Greek, he deals specifically with the morphology structure of the Greek verb and its high level of synthesis. Much of what I’m doing in FLEx (but not all) on the Greek verb is based on Matthews’ analysis. Its helpful and provides a good vocabulary for what we see in Greek word formation in terms of having multiple morpheme forms representing multiple grammatical meanings (i.e. the primary endings coincide with both subject agreement and present tense and the secondary endings coincide with past tense [<- insert proximate/remote if you prefer]).
4. Robert Van Valin Jr.’s An Introduction to Syntax.
   This book on syntax covers the same ground as Kroeger’s book above and doesn’t add to much more. Its main strength is the last chapter, which provides an extremely helpful survey of different theories of syntax how they differ and what Van Valin views as their strengths and weaknesses for analyzing synax. Of course, his own theory, Role and Reference Grammar, obviously wins out in his mind, but even still, its a relatively fair survey and provides information that’s hard to find elsewhere. What it does not do is provide much theoretical discussion for why there different theories do what they do in their analysis, but that’s okay because genearlly that’s more advanced information anyway. Basically, its more reliable than Wikipedia and relatively cheap used. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say much about functional theories of syntax (i.e. Simon Dik, Halliday, Givon, Bulter, etc.), but there are worse things int he world.
5. Gillian Brown and George Yule’s Discourse Analysis (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).
   I’ve only read parts of this book, but what I’ve read has been good. Its “old” (1983), but has and continues to hold its ground against other newer books on the subject. That isn’t to say that the book hasn’t been surpassed. Its just that none of those books are very helpful as introductions. So basically, I would say that Brown and Yule functions well as a starting point into more advanced discussions, which perhaps I’ll mention in a future post on more advance books that cover these subjects.

I think I’ll do at least two more posts for an annotated linguistics bibliography. It depends on what people want. At a minimum, I plan on writing another post on more advanced discussions of these same topics and then a third post on books that cover these topics that relate to Greek. But if anyone prefers, I could also do a post on other aspects of linguistics – phonology & phonetics. I wish I could do something in semantics or lexicography, but I’ve read far less in those areas than I have in syntax or morphology. Now with that said, I would hold that they’re all interconnected – grammar, in my view, is the interaction of the lexicon, syntax, pragmatics, phonology, morphology, and semantics all together. You can’t really separate them from each other.

There are dozens of thoughts that popped into my head as I read Steve’s followup post on scholarship. His main point is simply that it is the specialist’s responsibility to make their work understandable to the masses.

This divide between those who write incomprehensible monographs to those who write accessible ones is one we seen in the linguistic world as well. When it comes to syntax, Paul Kroeger’s books Analyzing Grammar & Analyzing Syntax (in that order) are incredibly helpful for the brand new student*. This is syntactic analysis in its most basic form. And those two books, which are geared toward the beginning student to prepare them for field linguistics with SIL/Wycliffe field, are going to have a greater impact than any book on linguistic theory. Books on theoretical linguistics are often impenetrable and extremely challenging to read.

On the other hand, the field linguist’s goal is clarity. It was regularly driven into my head as a student last year that when I write grammatical analysis I make sure that following my analysis and formalisms my prose is clear. Formal systems and frameworks come and go, so if you want your work to be understandable to the next generation studying this language, you had better write clearly. Any analysis you give, and this applies to Porter’s Systemic work as well, must be beneficial beyond that framework. Otherwise, what’s the point? Nobody will understand it otherwise.

But either way all linguists whether on the field or in the class room know that if they want their work to be accepted, they need to, at the very least, make it accessible to other linguists, even those who don’t know the languages directly.

And here’s the problem. When I look at the past 20 years of linguistics work in Hellenistic Greek and the New Testament, I see more obscurity than clarity. All over the place you will find scholars who talk about “wanting to get into this aspect discussion” and so they pick up Porter’s tome and find it incomprehensible and inaccessible. So even if Campbell’s book, which I disagree with (and I hope my criticisms are accessible) gives these people some hooks to hang more advanced discussions on, I’ll be happy. Its my experience that learning the vocabulary of any particular field is the biggest stop (e.g. I passed my CLEP text for Sociology in college by studying the glossary in the back rather than reading the chapters).

But this goes beyond aspect. What has linguistics give us in the past twenty years? For the most part, the vast majority of linguistic work & the New Testament has been more frustrating than anything else (Louw & Nida and Cotterell & Turner are the exception here). Its been twenty years and only now with Steve’s work is discourse analysis moving forward in a way that will make it helpful. There have been a number of books that have claimed the title “introduction,” and then turned out to be a collection of technical articles on a variety of topics that do very little to introduce anything.

Here are comments by Dr. Gerald Peterman on Jeffrey T. Reed’s A Discourse Analysis of Philippians from JETS 42, starting at 514ff.

I must admit I found parts of Reed’s first section to be quite tedious, as he delved into the obvious, such as that NT writers “are not readily available to be questioned regarding their assumptions and intentions” (pp. 39- 40) and that context limits word choice so that we cannot complete the statement I gulped down with the phrase a dog running through the park. At times hermeneutical guidelines are wrapped with different words and presented as fresh insights, even though a careful reader can find some of the same hermeneutical instruction being given in Plutarch’s How a Young man Should Study Poetry (ca. AD 50–120). I do not imply that discourse analysis is without value, only that its insights are sometimes presented as new when in fact they are actually sharpening of old insights. . . . For the scholar interested in Philippians studies, Reed is worth reading. Nevertheless, I anticipate his work having a minimal impact on Philippian scholarship, for two reasons: (1) He reaches no firm conclusions regarding integrity. Firm conclusions spark response and controversy. Controversy brings more readers and thus wider impact. (2) For the reader unfamiliar with linguistics, his work is hard reading. (my emphasis and you can read the full review HERE)

But the amazing thing is that Reed himself has recognized the difficult of reading his own work 3 years earlier (and one year before his book was published), but apparently did very little to make it more accessible. He published an article in JETS 39 on DA & Phillippians, writing these words,

To date, discourse analysis is a peripheral hermeneutic of NT studies, perhaps eventually doomed to the wastebasket. I have been personally told by a respected senior NT scholar that discourse analysis is nothing more than exegesis disguised in the garb of linguistic terminology. So goes the argument: Why read a discourse analysis of Philippians when I can read a master like J. B. Lightfoot who speaks in my own hermeneutical language? (‘Discourse Analysis as New Testament Hermeneutic: A Retrospective and Prospective Appraisal.’ JETS 39 (1996) 223-40)

Unfortunately, Reed left the task of responding to this problem to others rather than responding to it himself. Why did it take ten years for someone to actually do this? I’m still trying to figure that one out, though I do find it interesting that it was someone who doesn’t accept Porter’s linguistic framework.

This is getting long. I’ll pick up Aspect again in the next post.

*Unfortunately, the more introductory one is also the most expensive one…I don’t know why.

I referenced it in my previous post, but I am very excited to finally have access to Levinsohn’s Discourse Features of New Testament Greek: A Coursebook on the Information Structure of New Testament Greek. Its been a while since I’ve been able to use it. But finally, its accessible again!

Steve Runge has started a blog this week at http://www.ntdiscourse.org/ Those of you who are interested in Greek might want to check it out, especially in light of the blog’s subtitle:

“Removing the mystery from discourse grammar.”

His first post gives a little of his own back ground and his second is a helpful discussion of “Meta-comments.” If you’re wondering exactly what those are and how they relate to Greek (or any langauage for that matter), you will definitely want to read his very helpful explanation.

I’ve added him to my blogroll.

Have you ever sat down in a big cozy chair beside a fire place, curled up with a copy of Daniel Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament?

I sure never have. (please, just bear with me)

But I have read that book – just not in that setting. Maybe someday, though I think I’d choose a book I haven’t read before.

I’m one of those guys who reads the preface. I also read the forward, copyright page & cataloging information, peruse the index, browse the bibliography, and examine closely the table of contents.

Some books have prefaces that you have to come back to and read again. Now there are a variety of reasons for this. It might be the personal details about the author. Dr. Burke’s Adopted into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor is like this, though in my case it helps that I took more classes from Dr. Burke in my undergrad than any othe professor, had him and his family over for dinner after I was married and continue to stay in contact with him relatively regularly (by the way, his Family Matters: A Socio-Historical Study of Kinship Metaphors is also wonderful).

For other books, it might be a statement or comment that pops into your mind from time to time. Wallace’s preface is like that for me. Specifically, its this statement:

“Contrary to the current trend, this work has no chapter on discourse analysis (DA). The rationale for this lacuna is fourfold: (1) DA is still in its infant stages of development, in which the methods, terminology, and results tend to be unstable and overly subjective. (2) DA’s methods, as shifting as they are, tend not to start from the ground up (i.e., they do not begin with the word, nor even with the sentence). This by no means invalidates DA; but it does make its approach quite different from that of syntactical investigation. (3) Along these lines, since this is explicitly a work on syntax, DA by definition only plays at the perimeter of that topic and hence is not to be included. (4) Finally, DA is too significant a topic to receive merely a token treatment, appended as it were to the end of a book on grammar. It deserves its own full-blown discussion, such as can be found in other works of Cotterell and Turner, D. A. Black.“

That’s always been a hard one for me to read, particularly because, as excellent as Cotterell and Turner’s book is and how enjoyable is the book edited by D. A. Black, no usable introduction to discourse grammar exists. I emphasize both usable and introduction. The books that have been written thus far are simply not accessible. Jefferey Reed’s Discourse Analysis of Philippians is an enjoyable book, but in the words of Dr. Gerald Peterman, “For the reader unfamiliar with linguistics, his work is hard reading” (JETS 42:515, 1999).

But I’m encouraged.

Because I’m reading quite usable and understandable introduction to Discourse Grammar & Greek right now.

Are you still curious about what I’m reading? This is the very same book I mentioned yesterday: Cross-linguistic, focused on discourse, and builds on past grammars.

And its right here:

Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction to Discourse Features for Teaching and Exegesis by Steve Runge

But this book isn’t published yet, how are you reading it?

Well, I’m helping with some editing. And I have to say that what I’ve read thus far has been very impressive. This is the book I wish existed back when I was in my exegesis class – both the one I was taught or the one I TA’d.

And No. I’m not being paid for saying any of this.

Now this is the kind of book that should have been written years ago, but never was.

Historically, Greek grammars are based on a translational approach. How do we translate this work, this construction, this clause, etc. Most grammars teach you how to translate rather than how to understand.

What is needed is a grammar that teaching linguistically. That doesn’t mean a whole lot of jargon and terminology that nobody can follow except for the initiated. What I mean is that we need a grammar that teaches cross-linguistically. When we look at Greek writing, the language seems so far away and very strange.

But there are so many universals that all languages express. Probably more amazing than how different languages are is how similar they are.

And there has been no grammar that starts with that point. Before asking what Greek does, no grammar has asked, “What does langauge do?” The result is some embarrassing claims about Greek, claims that should not have seen the light of day. For example Some have claimed that its possible to begin a paragraph with an verbal ellipsis, basing their evidence on nominal clauses. But nominal clauses are not ellipsis. They are verbless existentials – a “to be” clause. Many languages can do this, including Greek. Elliptical clauses cannot begin a new paragraph or pericope because they require an antecedent. Nominal clauses do not. Ephesians 5.22 does not fit into the nominal clause category. Its just as connected with what procedes as it is with what follows.

But the bigger problem of Greek grammars is their focus on words – to the expense of larger units of meaning, especially discourse. There is meaning beyond the sentence. Langauges structure their paragraphs by grammar just like they structure their clauses by grammar. Few grammar go beyond words and those that do can be rather obtuse. The result here is that we have commentaries that go from word to word discussion all the possible meanings as if they’re independent entities. For example one commentary (unnamed) on Ephesians 1.22, already concluding that ἔδωκεν in that particular verse means “gave” continues on to discussion the possibilites of what τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ might mean. Not realizing that by having already decided that ἔδωκεν mean “gave” semantically, τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ can and only mean “to the church” because what you give something, you always need to give it to someone! Meaning is found in groups.

But we need a grammar that goes beyond both words and clauses. How is information structured in Greek? How does Greek introduce new topics? How does Greek place focus on a particular word or phrase? And how does that compare with English?

And probably most importantly, what grammar does all of these things without throwing out the baby with the bath water. Linguists, I think, are becoming known for trying to change everything in NT studies more than anything else. And that is most unfortunate because there continues to be much value in the existing grammars.

The grammar I’m reading right now does all these things. It’s cross-linguistic. Its discusses discourse. It builds on the past traditional grammars and linguistics. On top of that, its readable.

Anyone curious what I’m reading?

If so, I’ll tell you more HERE.

These are some thoughts that have been passing through my head for some time now. And I think they’re ready to be expressed.

In the past two decades the trend has been to use the following definitions:

• Aspect is the author’s subjective viewpoint of a given verb.
• Aktionsart is the pragmatic result of the interaction of semantics in a given clause complex.

Now I’ve mentioned in passing the problem with these definitions and the way we use them in my discussion of Aspect & Stanley Porter’s use of the terms HERE. To summarize, the problem is that in the past the term Aktionsart was used to refer both to what now call Aspect and Aktionsart. Now, the specialists know this. Porter, in spite of confusion I describe previously, knows this and I believe that others do as well, including Campbell, Decker, Fanning, and the rest – at least that’s my impression in reading them.

But what does this terminological difference do when those who are advancing into intermediate and advanced Greek study are reading Moulton, Robertson or Moule (who actually uses both, see the additional notes of the second edition) and they come across the term aktionsart based on the definitions now used. Will these new definitions that make a distinction where there was not one previously be read back into the old grammars?

You can bet they will. They already have. We already see it in many places, including the RBL review of Rodney Decker’s volume.

Even my oversimplification of the thesis here should show that there are indeed some interesting new ideas in the study of Greek; if Porter is correct, standard works such as A. T. Robertson or Blass, de Brunner, and Funk will become of relevance mostly to scholars of the history of New Testament criticism.

I’m not saying that the past two decades of work on Aspect have not been needed because they have. At some point between1919 when the last truly “new” edition of of Robertson’s “big grammar” came out and the 1970’s, those studying the New Testament began miss reading the old books, turning Moulton’s “Punctiliar Aorst” into the “Once and for All Aorist” and the technical term aktionsart began being interpreted based on its literal translation into English. The past two decades have brought us back on track and have pointed a way forward too. Decker’s work on deixis as well as the augument was very important and more needs to be done. Campbell’s application of discourse analysis to aspect studies have also drastically improved our understanding of usage. And the new distinctions and clarifications on terminology such as aspect and aktionsart is incredibly valuable.

But who is going to tell the new students that Blass, Moulton, Robertson, and many others were not complete fools in their examination of the Greek verb? Who is going to tell them that they were using one word where we now use two?

I fear that Robert Paul Seesengood’s words in his review of Decker quoted above will become true simply because the next generation of scholars will be unaware of past terminology.

So then (salient development marker), what should be done about this problem?