Monday, December 29, 2014

How subjective, really?

[A]spect has nothing inherently to do with temporal sequence, with procedural characteristics of actual situations or of verbs and verb-phrases, or with prominence in discourse. It is instead a matter of viewpoint or focus, which is a rather subjective category, since a speaker may choose to view or portray certain occurrences by one aspect or another without regard to the nature of the occurrence itself. However, fully subjective choices between aspects are not common, since the nature of the occurrence or the procedural character of the verb or verb-phrase can restrict the way an occurrence is viewed by a speaker. In fact, aspect interacts so closely with such features and is so significantly affected by them that no analysis of aspect can be comprehensive without taking into account these interactions.—Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, page 421

<idle musing>
So ends Fanning's magnum opus on aspect. Lots of good stuff to digest. I probably will be coming back to it in a year or so after I've digested it and read more by others, such as Comrie's Aspect. Unfortunately, because of Oxford's ridiculous pricing, I won't have it on my shelf, but will need to use interlibrary loan again...
</idle musing>

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