Greek Aspect, Part 2

by William Annis

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Introduction

From last time we presented Part 1 of this tutorial, A Not Too Tense Introduction to Greek Aspect, by Paul Bell. Part 2 of the aspect tutorial briefly explores the practical implications of the discussion in the first part, with parallel sentences for comparison, and some examples from Greek literature.

Now that we've covered some of the theory of aspect, we turn to examples. We'll touch only briefly on aspect in simple sentences since it is in the relationship between main and subordinate clauses that aspect is most likely to be confusing to beginners. Traditional Greek instruction, in particular, is apt to cause problems: when you've been told the aorist is primarily a past tense, the aorist imperative is going to seem puzzling: "raised the sails" doesn't make much sense.

We are going to omit conditional sentences from our examples. What we have to say about aspect applies to these, too, and in fact simplifies the usual inventory of conditional types. But explaining the additional role of tense and mood would distract from our focus on aspect.

In the discussion below the most important thing to keep in mind - and which we'll repeat a few times for good measure - is that only the indicative verb forms of the present, aorist and perfect may have tense. All the rest do not.

Durative/Present Stem

Verb forms made from the durative stem (traditionally known as the "present" stem) show imperfective aspect. In the indicative this includes the present and imperfect conjugations: ble/pw I see, I am seeing, e)/blepon I was seeing.

Above we said that the imperfective aspect shows an action in progress, in the middle of going on. So, in non-indicative clauses the present forms view the action as on-going, generally at the same time as the main verb. For example, badi/zwn le/gei (while) walking, he speaks. Here the present form le/gei does indicate tense, but badi/zwn indicates aspect, namely, that the walking is seen as ongoing at the time of the speaking.

If we change the tense of the main verb: badi/zwn e)/legen, (while) walking he was speaking. Again, the main verb indicates tense, the participle aspect.

Infinitives and imperatives formed from the present stem also indicate aspect rather than tense. ou)/ fhsi ou(/tw le/gein he denies that he is saying so. The semantics of the various imperatives, positive and negative, can get a little complex, but when when a speaker gives a command in the present imperative he sees the action as on-going, possibly taking a while: tau=ta poiei=te do these things!

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About the Author

William Annis

William Annis is Unix System Administrator (i.e., a professional computer geek) in Madison, Wisconsin. He divides his spare time between reading history and bad science fiction, bonsai and classical languages, especially Greek. William combines his computer skills with classical studies at the web site, www.aoidoi.org, which is dedicated to the study of classical Greek poetry, and includes articles about Greek meter and poetics, the full texts of Greek poems, often accompanied commentaries with vocabulary, syntax and cultural notes. William is a moderator for the Greek board on the Textkit forum.