Review of "Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek," by Constantine R. Campbell (Part 2)

In the last post in this particular series, this review summarized Campbell's introduction, which introduced his purpose for writing the book. In the first chapter, Campbell introduces his definition of verbal aspect and verbal aspect's relation to semantics and pragmatics.

Campbell gives this basic definition of aspect: "While there are various ways of defining verbal aspect, the simplest description is viewpoint. An author or speaker views an action, event, or state either from the outside or from the inside. The view . . . from the outside is called perfective aspect, while the view from the inside is called imperfective aspect" (19). Campbell gives an oft-used illustration of verbal aspect, a report on a parade. Imagine that a reporter is viewing a parade from outside the parade in a helicopter; this is perfective aspect. He or she sees the whole parade from beginning to end, but does not see the parade up close. Now, imagine a reporter is viewing a parade from the street as the parade is going by; this is imperfective aspect. He or she sees the parade as it is going by, but does not see its beginning or end. In other words, the perfective aspect presents the action of a verb a simple whole, from beginning to end, and the imperfective aspect presents the action of the verb as a continuing action, without reference to the beginning or end. Remember the the above illustration. The view from the helicopter is a view of the whole event. One can see the beginning and the end of the parade from a helicopter; on the street, however, one does not see the whole parade from that view, but he or she sees it progressing.

Examples are always helpful in explaining a concept, so here are a couple of English sentences to distinguish further the two aspects.

Christian wrote a blog post the other day (perfective).

Christian was witting a blog post the other day (imperfective).

See, even English uses aspect! Using either one, one still presents the same action, but the view of the action is different. The first sentence simply states that it happened. The second sentence presents the action as a progressing action, but it still happened, although the beginning and end of the action is not inherent.

Campbell, then, compares and contrasts aspect with aktionsart and tense. Tense refers to the time of the action (e.g. future, past, etc.) and aktionsart, a German word, refers to the "'type of action'" (21). For example, a verb's "type of action" can be intensive, customary, gnomic, iterative, etc. Typically, Greek verbs are referred to by their tense, but Campbell believes tense in these instances refers to the form of a verb, not a verb's inherent meaning; thus, tense is not a necessary part of a particular verb. The same is true of aktionsart. The "type of action" is not inherent in a particular verb. The only one that is inherent in any particular verb is aspect. Campbell explains this concept by distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics, in this case, refers to the qualities that are a necessary part of a given verb form. Pragmatics refers to the qualities of a verb that only come from a verb's particular context, its interaction with the literary and historical context of where it is used.