This word is a German word that literally means “type of action.” There are various types of action. There are punctiliar actions, iterative actions, ingressive actions, and so on. The category of Aktionsart describes how an action took place. If it happened as a once-occurring, instantaneous event, it is called punctiliar. If the action was repeated over and over, it is called iterative. If the action focuses on the beginning, it is called ingressive. Early on in the academic discussion about such things, there was much confusion between Aktionsart and aspect. These days there is a general consensus as to the difference between the two terms, and it is vital that we properly understand the distinction.
Aktionsart refers to how an action actually takes place—what sort of action it is. Aspect refers to viewpoint—how the action is viewed. They are two different categories.
Let’s take Romans 5:14 as an example. In that verse we are told that Death reigned from the time of Adam to Moses. The verb “reigned” expresses perfective aspect. This is the view from the helicopter. We are presented with a summary of what happened; we are told simply that it happened. This is the external viewpoint. But when we ask what actually happened, we are able to say a range of other things. For starters, this action took a long time! There were many years between Adam and Moses. Death’s reign between Adam and Moses was an ongoing, expansive event. This was not a once-occurring, instantaneous type of action. With this example, we can appreciate that there is a clear difference between aspect and Aktionsart. Aspect refers to how the action is viewed: it is viewed externally as a whole. Aktionsart refers to what actually happened: it was an ongoing event that spanned many years. The difference between aspect and Aktionsart leads us to another important distinction.
Semantics and Pragmatics
The terms semantics and pragmatics come from modern linguistics and refer to a distinction that is now applied to the discussion about Greek verbs. Again, it is important that we understand what these terms mean.
1. Semantics
When speaking of verbs, semantics refers to the values that are encoded in the verbal form. These values are unchanging and are always there when the particular verbal form occurs (allowing for exceptional circumstances such as anomalous expressions and certain fixed idioms). In anything other than these exceptional circumstances, a semantic value is uncancelable—it is always there and cannot be canceled out. Semantics refers to what the verb means at its core.
What does an aorist encode? What is core to an aorist that is different from an imperfect? What does an aorist always carry with it? By the way, it is worth noting a little issue to do with terminology. Often the term semantics is used in a nontechnical sense to refer to the range of meaning that a word may have. This is not the sense in which it is now used in academic discussion. The range of meaning of a particular word is better termed lexical semantics, and the type of semantics that we are interested in at the moment is verbal semantics or grammatical semantics, which refers to the uncancelable properties of the verb form.
2. Pragmatics
When speaking of verbs, pragmatics refers to the expression of semantic values in context and in combination with other factors. In other words, pragmatics refers to how it all ends up—the way language is used in context. The way that semantics and pragmatics relate together is a little like this: we take the semantic elements and plug them into a text that will have a range of things going on within it already, which bounce off and interact with the semantic values; the outcome is pragmatics.
Pragmatic values can change from context to context; they are cancelable and not always there when particular verb forms are used. Perhaps an illustration will help to clarify further the differences between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics asks, “Who am I?” while pragmatics asks, “What do I do?” These are two different questions (though our Western culture tends to blur them together). Who I am is about who I am at the core of my being—what it is that makes me uniquely me. Who I am might be expressed by what I do, but what I do is not who I am. If you were to ask me, “Who are you?” and I reply that I am a lawyer, I haven’t really answered the question. Who am I? I’m Con. What do I do? I’m a lawyer. But I might quit law and take up jazz music. If I do that, I haven’t changed who I am; I’ve just changed what I do (I know life’s not quite as simple as that, but bear with the analogy). Discovering the semantics of the aorist is to ask, “Who are you, aorist?” To discover the pragmatics of the aorist, we ask, “And what do you do, aorist?”
The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is useful in sharpening the difference between aspect and Aktionsart. Aspect is a semantic value. The aspect of a particular tense-form doesn’t change. An aorist will always be perfective in aspect. This will be the case no matter which word (lexeme) is used as an aorist or in what context it is used. Aspect is uncancelable. When asked, “Who are you, aorist?” the answer is, “I am perfective in aspect.”
Aktionsart, on the other hand, is a pragmatic value. The Aktionsart of a particular tense-form can change. Sometimes an aorist will be punctiliar in Aktionsart. Sometimes it will be iterative, sometimes ingressive. It all depends on which lexeme is used as an aorist, on the context, and on what actually happened. Aktionsart is cancelable. When asked, “What do you do, aorist?” the answer is, “Well, I do many things. I have many possible Aktionsart outcomes.” Nearly all scholars working with Greek verbs now agree on this distinction between semantics and pragmatics. The remaining question related to the distinction, however, is this: Is temporal reference semantic or pragmatic? If temporal reference is semantic, then Greek verbs truly are tenses. A verb’s temporal reference is uncancelable and is a core part of its meaning. An aorist is a past tense and must always be a past tense. But here, of course, lies a problem. We learn early on that aorists are not always past referring. Therefore, we are led to ask: Is past temporal reference a semantic value of the aorist? Some scholars say no, the aorist is not a past tense. Even though the aorist often ends up expressing past temporal reference when used in Greek texts, this is a pragmatic implicature rather than semantic encoding. After all, these scholars point out, there are plenty of other elements in the text that indicate what the time frame is to be understood as. In fact, there are several languages in which the time frame is indicated purely by such deictic markers—words like “yesterday,” “now,” “later,” and so forth. Even genre can set the time frame. For example, narratives naturally refer to the past (even without needing to use words like “yesterday”) simply because it is understood that they are about events that have already happened. If the time frame is indicated by deictic markers and/or genre, why do we think that verbs must indicate time as well? The answer to that question, for most of us I think, is that we are used to that being the case in English (or so we think, anyway). But such is not the case in at least some other languages, and now the question has been raised with reference to the Greek verbal system. We will return to this issue at several points. Regardless of one’s position on this matter, however, I think the term “tense-form” is more helpful than “tense” when referring to verbs, because it reminds us that it is the morphological form that is being addressed, whatever the form happens to communicate.
Conclusion
We have seen in this chapter that aspect refers to the viewpoint that an author subjectively chooses when portraying an action, event, or state. There are two viewpoints from which to choose: the view from the outside—perfective aspect—and the view from the inside—imperfective aspect. We have seen that aspect is different from Aktionsart in that the latter term describes how an action actually takes place, whereas aspect refers simply to viewpoint. Finally, we have seen that aspect is a semantic value encoded in the verb and is therefore uncancelable, whereas Aktionsart is a pragmatic value affected by a range of contextual factors and is therefore cancelable.
- Constantine R. Campbell, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek, pp21-25
