The Perfect Storm: Critical Discussion of The Semantics of The Greek Perfect Tense Under Aspect Theory (Studies in Biblical Greek) Campbell

The Perfect Storm: Critical Discussion
of the Semantics of the Greek Perfect

Tense Under Aspect Theory (Studies in
Biblical Greek) Campbell
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9/28/21, 1:40 PM The Perfect Storm
Studies in Biblical Greek
The Perfect
Storm
Critical
Discussion of
the Semantics of
the Greek Perfect
Tense Under
Aspect Theory
Constantine R. Campbell,
Buist M. Fanning, and
Stanley E. Porter
Edited and with an

introduction by
D. A. Carson
PETERLANG
https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/2663581/1 1/188
Nowhere are the chaotic debates surrounding contemporary aspect theory

more heated than in discussions of the theory’s application to Hellenistic
Greek, and especially its understanding of the semantics of the Greek perfect
tense. This book is a distilled academic debate among three of the best-known
scholars on the subject, each defending his own unique interpretation while
engaging the other two. The Perfect Storm will prove an indispensable resource
for any scholar seeking to write convincingly on the Greek perfect in the future.
Constantine R. Campbell is Senior Vice-President for Global Content and Bible

Teaching for Our Daily Bread. He is formerly Professor of New Testament at
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Buist M. Fanning is Senior Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at

Dallas Theological Seminary.
Stanley E. Porter is President and Dean, Professor of New Testament, and Roy
A. Hope Chair of Christian Worldview at McMaster Divinity College.
D. A. Carson is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical

Divinity School.
www.peterlang.com (http://www.pet
The Perfect Storm
Studies in Biblical Greek

D. A. Carson
General Editor
Vol. 21
The Studies in Biblical Greek series is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.
PETER LANG
New York • Bern • Berlin
Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw
Constantine R. Campbell,
Buist M. Fanning, and Stanley E. Porter
The Perfect Storm

Critical Discussion of the Semantics
of the Greek Perfect Tense
Under Aspect Theory
Edited and with an introduction by
D. A. Carson
PETER LANG
New York • Bern • Berlin
Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Campbell, Constantine R. | Fanning, Buist M. | Porter, Stanley E. |
Carson, D. A., editor.
Title: The perfect storm: critical discussion of the semantics of the
Greek perfect tense under aspect theory / Constantine R. Campbell, Buist M. Fanning,
and Stanley E. Porter; edited and with an introduction by D. A. Carson.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2021.
Series: Studies in biblical Greek; vol. 21 | ISSN 0897-7828
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019045673 | ISBN 978-1-4331-8374-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-4331-6816-1 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-6817-8 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4331-8375-1 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Greek language, Biblical—Tense. | Greek language,
Biblical—Aspect. | Greek language, Biblical—Semantics.
Classification: LCC PA847 .P47 2021 | DDC 487/.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045673 (https://lccn.loc.gov/201
DOI 10.3726/b17518
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/. (http://dnb.d-nb.de/.)
© 2021 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

80 Broad Street, 5th floor, New York, NY 10004
www.peterlang.com (http://www.peterlang.com)
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Soli Deo gloria.
Table of Contents
Series Editor’s Preface ix

1. An Introduction to the Debate 1
D. A. C ARSON
2. The Greek Perfect: Why It Isn’t 5

C ONSTANTINE R. C AMPBELL
3. Response to Campbell’s Imperfective View of the Greek Perfect 25

BUIST M. F ANNING
4. Why the Greek Perfect Tense-Form Is Stative: A Response to Constantine
R. Campbell 45
STANLEY E. PORTER
5. Defining the Ancient Greek Perfect: Interacting with Recent
Alternatives to the Traditional View of the Perfect 61

BUIST M. F ANNING
6. Response to Fanning 79
7. Defining the Greek Perfect Tense-Form as Stative: A Response to Buist
M. Fanning 91
STANLEY E. PORTER
8. The Perfect Isn’t Perfect—It’s Stative: The Meaning of the Greek Perfect
Tense-Form in the Greek Verbal System 105

STANLEY E. PORTER
9. Response to Porter 129

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS
10. Response to Porter’s Stative View of the Greek Perfect 143

BUIST M. F ANNING
Bibliography 159
Index of Names 169
Index of Scripture 173
Series Editor’s Preface
Studies in Biblical Greek is an occasional series of monographs designed to

promote and publish the latest research into the Greek of both Testaments.
The Series does not assume that biblical Greek is a distinct dialect within the
larger world of koinē: on the contrary, the assumption is that biblical Greek
is part and parcel of the Hellenistic Greek that dominated the Mediterranean
world from about 300 B.C. to A.D. 300. If the Series focuses on the corpora
of the Old and New Testaments, it is because these writings generate major
interest around the world, not only for religious but also for historical and
academic reasons.
Research into the broader evidence of the period, including epigraphical
and inscriptional materials as well as literary works, is welcome in the Series,
provided the results are cast in terms of their bearing on biblical Greek. In the
same way, the Series is devoted to fresh philological, syntactical and linguistic
study of the Greek of the biblical books, with the subsidiary aim of displaying
the contribution of such to accurate exegesis.
The present volume is an unusual entry in the SBG series. In the contro-
versial world of aspect theory, nothing is more controversial than the seman-
tics of the Greek perfect tense-form. Here three prominent scholars argue for
their respective understandings of the Greek perfect, and seek also to rebut
the other two. The introductory chapter sets out the origin and shape of
the chapters. Few will be the readers who are not almost convinced by one
protagonist or another, only to be similarly almost convinced by the next
protagonist.
Let the debate begin!
D. A. Carson
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
1. An Introduction to the Debate

D. A. C ARSON
In November 2010, Constantine R. Campbell, Buist M. Fanning, and Stanley

E. Porter engaged each other in a spirited debate on the Greek perfect. The
setting was the Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics section of SBL. The
section is normally well attended, but that day something over 600 scholars
were packed into the room. (I know; from where I was standing at the back of
the room, I had a good view as I counted them.) The time constraints being
what they are on these occasions, there was little time for detailed interaction
among the three presenters, and still less for questions from the floor. There
was just enough time for interaction that all of us who attended could glimpse
the sparks among the three presenters and the interest of the audience.
After that session, I suggested that the three might consider collecting
their respective contributions into a book for the Studies in Biblical Greek
series, and they readily concurred. Discussion yielded two further deci-
sions: (1) Instead of briefly revising the material they had just presented, they
would engage in extensive revision, including reflections prompted by what
they had heard from the other two participants. In other words, the core
papers would be ratcheted up to a higher level. And then each scholar would
respond to the other two. The aim was to make the level of interaction more
detailed and more penetrating than what was possible in one SBL session.
(2) Although there are views of the semantics of the Greek perfect tense-form
other than the three articulated here, it was decided to restrict this book to a
discussion of the findings of the three scholars represented here.
That second point requires further elucidation.
First, this book focuses on the views of these three scholars, and only acci-
dentally on the way their respective views are sometimes adopted, defended,
and critiqued elsewhere. For instance, Mathewson and Emig1 largely align
1 David L. Mathewson and Elodie Ballantine Emig, Intermediate Greek Grammar: Syntax
for Students of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016).
2 D. A. CARSON
with Porter; Kenneth L. McKay, a classicist by training, developed aspect

theory in his study of the Greek verb in classical Greek 2 before turning his
attention to the New Testament3 ; and, although there are of course idiosyn-
cratic preferences in his work, his theory belongs to the same species of aspect
theory represented in these pages4—not least his treatment of the Greek per-
fect.5 Similarly, there are studies of verbal aspect in, say, Mark’s Gospel6 that
operate under one or more of the same theories that constrain this book. Our
focus here, however, is on the work of Campbell, Fanning, and Porter.
Second , aspect theory is currently in a state of flux and uncertainty. We
have returned to the time of the Judges: everyone does as they see fit (Judg.
21:25). Even at the level of terminology, there is little consistency. For exam-
ple, a scholar as eminent as Geoffrey Horrocks asserts that certain “verbs,
whose lexical aspectual character (or Aktionsart) might … be described
as [such and such]”7—thereby identifying lexical aspectual character and
Aktionsart, an identification that could not be approved by any of the par-
ticipants in this volume. In some ways, the most comprehensive treatment of

the current debate is The Greek Verb Revisited, to which I have just referred,8
but its subtitle, A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis, is wildly optimistic if
the words “fresh approach” are meant to signal unity of both method and
result. The book includes numerous outstanding and thought-provoking
essays, but that doesn’t mean they cohere very well. If there are common-
alities in the essays in Fresh Approach, one of the more striking is this: Greek
tense-forms commonly grammaticalize both time and kind of action (or the
2 Greek Grammar for Students: A Concise Grammar of Classical Attic with Special
Reference to Aspect in the Verb (Canberra: Australian National University, 1974).
3 Ibid., A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek: An Aspectual Approach
(Studies in Biblical Greek 5; New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
4 This is not to say that Campbell, Fanning, and Porter always agree with him, any more
than they always agree with each other: see, for example, Stanley E. Porter, “Time
and Aspect in New Testament Greek: A Response to K. L. McKay,” in Linguistic
Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2015), 159–74.

5 Ibid., “The Use of the Ancient Greek Perfect Down to the End of the Second Century
Century AD,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 12 (1965): 1–21; idem,
“On the Perfect and Other Aspects in the Greek Non-Literary Papyri,” Bulletin of
the Institute of Classical Studies 27 (1980): 23–49; idem, “On the Perfect and Other
Aspects in New Testament Greek,” Novum Testamentum 23 (1981): 289–329.

6 Rodney J. Decker, Temporal Deixis of the Greek Verb in the Gospel of Mark with Reference
to Verbal Aspect (Studies in Biblical Greek 10; New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
7 “Envoi,” in The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis , ed. Steven
E. Runge & Christopher J. Fresch (Bellingham: Lexham, 2016), 629.
8 See n.7.
An Introduction to the Debate 3
author’s choice of how to present an event or kind of action). What is usually

missing is rigorous discussion as to how one decides between, on the one
hand, the inference that the entire semantic freight of a verb in a particular
context is encoded in its morphology, and, on the other, the inference that
the tense-form encodes part of the total semantic freight (e.g., verbal aspect;
or, under a more traditional theory, time relationships), while other parts are
conveyed by lexis, deictic markers, syntactical peculiarities, discourse consid-
erations, and so forth.
A third reason for restricting the number and focus of the participants in
this volume is that not only are there many competing positions surfacing in
academic aspect theory, but the sub-disciplines that have a bearing on how to
understand the perfect keep multiplying like rabbits. Debates that affect one’s
grasp of the perfect include the interplay between tense-form and discourse
analysis,9 verbal forms and grounding status (the relationship between tense-
form and theme line or support line), diachronic and synchronic analyses,10
markedness, prominence (including backgrounding and foregrounding, and
word order), systemic linguistics, the underlying morphological structure of
the Greek verbal system, and much more. Another way of exposing the con-
ceptual hurdles that must be surmounted even to get a conversation going
on the semantics of the Greek perfect tense-form is to consider briefly the
most recent comprehensive theory of the perfect, that of Robert Crellin.11
Leaning on the work of Wolfgang Klein’s semantic framework as a reference
point,12 which provides a description of tense and aspect predicates in terms
of Situation Time, Topic Time, and Utterance Time, Crellin assesses and
finds inadequate other proposals before proposing that “the perfect derives
9 See, for example, Elizabeth Robar, “The Historical Present in NT Greek: An Exercise
in Interpreting Matthew,” in The Greek Verb Revisited, 329–52. At one level, her work
is admirably careful; at another, seems wedded, without defense, to the view that the
present tense-form, outside locations in Matthew where the historical present occurs,
encodes present time. Otherwise put, unless I have misunderstood her, she seems to
address semantic questions by appealing to pragmatic considerations.
10 For a succinct summary of the bearing of the history of the perfect on our under-
standing of the tense-form, see especially. Klaas Bentein, “Perfect,” Encyclopedia of
Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, https://referenceworks.brillonline.com. (https://re
ezproxy.tiu.edu/entries/encyclopedia-of-ancient-greek-language-and-linguistics/
perfect-EAGLLCOM_00000375, accessed 17 February 2015.
11 The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Koine Greek (Publications of the
Philological Society 47; Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016); idem, and more briefly,
“The Semantics of the Perfect in the Greek of the New Testament,” in The Greek Verb
Revisited, 430–57.
12 “The Present Perfect Puzzle,” Language 68 (1992): 525–52; idem, Time in Language
(Germanic Linguistics; London: Routledge, 1994).
4 D. A. CARSON
a homogeneous atelic eventuality from the predicate and includes [Topic

Time] within the [Situation Time] of this eventuality,”13 and then applies his
rubrics to the well-known diversity of functions of the perfect tense-form. It
remains to be seen whether Crellin will win a wide following; what is certain
is that his understanding of the semantics of the Greek perfect tense-form
inhabits another continent than where Campbell, Fanning, and Porter live.
So if in this book we have narrowed the field of inquiry, we have never-
theless increased its depth.
The nine-year delay between the original presentation of (an abbrevi-
ated form of) the core papers and the publication of this book sprang from
several factors, including my own indolence. Nevertheless our hope is that
the detailed argumentation in these papers will be consulted for many years
to come.
Our warm thanks to the careful labor of Desmond Teo, who helped with
the indexes.
13 Crellin, “Semantics of the Perfect,” 454.
2. The Greek Perfect: Why It Isn’t

CONSTANTINE R. C AMPBELL
1. Introduction
In this essay, I will argue that the best explanation for the use of the Greek per-
fect is that it is imperfective in aspect. For some, the very idea that a “perfect”
might be imperfective is a stumbling block in and of itself. Others might be
reticent to jettison traditional understandings of the perfect system. Yet oth-
ers may prefer to regard the perfect as stative in aspect. My chief argument for
the imperfective aspect of the Greek perfect is that, counter-intuitive nomen-
clature notwithstanding, imperfective aspect provides the strongest explana-
tory power for its use in context. In this essay I aim to do the following: (1)
Briefly restate some elements of my critiques of the traditional view and of
stative aspect; (2) Clear some misconceptions about imperfective aspect, and
restate some of the strengths of understanding the perfect as imperfective;
and (3) Respond to Porter’s lengthy critique of this understanding.1
2. The Greek Perfect Isn’t

The burden of this first section is to point out problems with the two main
approaches to the Greek perfect: the traditional view and the stative aspect
understanding. It will be observed that neither approach offers the most com-
pelling explanation of the full usage of the perfect, and that both approaches
1 I am also aware of the critiques of Mathewson and Cirafesi, but since these scholars
follow Porter, I will restrict my interaction to him. See David L. Mathewson, Verbal
Aspect in the Book of Revelation (Linguistic Biblical Studies 4; Leiden: Brill, 2010),
31–34; Wally V. Cirafesi, Verbal Aspect in Synoptic Parallels: On the Method and
Meaning of Divergent Tense-Form Usage in the Synoptic Passion Narratives (Linguistic
Biblical Studies 7; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 41–45.
6 CONSTANTINE R. C AMPBELL
suffer from significant theoretical weaknesses. We turn first to consider the

traditional view.
2.1 Against the Traditional View
Simply stated, the “traditional” view of the perfect claims that it conveys a past
action with present consequences. Strictly speaking, Fanning does not hold
to a traditional conception of the Greek perfect. His approach is aspectual,
while the traditional perfect is built upon Aktionsart categories. Nevertheless,
Fanning’s aspectual analysis of the perfect recasts the traditional understand-
ing into aspectual categories. He regards the perfect to be a combination of
perfective aspect, past tense, and stative Aktionsart,2 and he regards this as
consistent with the traditional understanding of the perfect. Since Fanning
regards his own conception as compatible with the traditional view, or at least
an aspectual reformulation of such, I will discuss both together.
2.1.1 Exceptions at Both Ends of the Semantic Conception
Along with several others, I have observed that the traditional description
requires a great deal of flexibility in order to account for perfect usage.
Sometimes it is the past action that is emphasized, while the present
state that emerges is not regarded as significant (the extensive or consumma-
tive perfect). Other times, it is the present result of the verbal action that is
emphasized while the past action is less significant (called the intensive perfect
by some grammars). Additionally, it is admitted that sometimes the perfect
expresses a purely aoristic action, thereby not admitting a present result at all
(the aoristic perfect), or, conversely, the perfect may express only the present
result with no hint of a past action in view (either the perfect of existing state
or the intensive perfect).3
How, then, does one account for the enormous flexibility required to
describe the usage of the Greek perfect? The short answer is that there are mul-
tiple types of exceptions to the rule. For instance, the numerous occurrences
of οἶδα and ἕστηκα are described as Homerisms that evidently became fossil-
ized.4 Fanning lists other lexemes that express a “present stative meaning,”
which are also regarded as fossilized forms, and are therefore exceptional.5 As
2 Buist M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford Theological

Monographs; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 112–20.
3 Constantine R. Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative: Soundings
in the Greek of the New Testament (Studies in Biblical Greek 13; New York: Peter
Lang, 2007), 162.

4 Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 112, n. 74.
5 Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 229.
The Greek Perfect 7
for those perfects that appear to behave as aorists, they likewise are regarded
as exceptional: “there are a few perfects in the NT which display a tendency
to become virtual aorists in denoting simply a past action without reference
to its present consequence.”6 He argues that true aoristic perfects are rare,
and are nevertheless distinct from aorist tense-forms “in that they refer not
only to a past occurrence but also to some present result of the action.”7 He
does not elaborate as to how this present result of the action is expressed
or to be understood. Consequently, Fanning regards purely present perfects
and purely aoristic perfects as exceptions that were produced through the
diachronic development of the language: “Exceptions to this pattern lie at
either end of the historical spectrum.”8 The difficulty with this analysis is not
so much related to the diachronic facts, but to the accommodation of them.
These “exceptional” uses of the perfect are awkwardly accommodated by the
traditional view. If we are serious about the linguistic principle of power of
explanation, an approach that more simply accommodates the full usage of
the perfect is preferable.
2.1.2 It Is Theoretically Weak to Allow Parts of the Semantic Conception to Be
Canceled
The distinction between semantics and pragmatics has become standard in

discussions about Greek over the past twenty or more years. This distinction
is widely held in linguistics, beyond Greek studies, and while there are varying
ways in which these terms are defined, nevertheless it remains a powerful tool.
A significant weakness of the traditional view of the perfect is that its supposed
semantic values are regularly and routinely transgressed. Whenever a perfect
does not seem to convey a past action, this value is canceled. Whenever a
perfect does not seem to convey present consequences, that value is can-
celed. But, of course, the entire point of the term “semantics”—at least in
the context of Greek verbal semantics—is that semantic values are uncancel-
lable. Even if we allow a few “exceptions” here or there for whatever reason,
we surely all agree that semantic values are meant to be expressed consis-
tently, otherwise we cannot label them semantic values. The traditional view
of the Greek perfect claims that past action and present consequences are the
semantic values of the form, but the fact that there are a staggering number
of perfects that either do not convey a past action, or do not convey present
consequences, makes the point clearly: these are not semantic values of the

7 Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 303.
Greek perfect. They are frequently and regularly canceled. Only by rejecting
the standard definition of “semantics” can the traditional view be salvaged.
2.1.4 The Latinization of the Greek Perfect
Finally, while it has yet to be proved, the traditional understanding of the

Greek perfect is likely a latinization, like deponency. At the 2010 SBL meet-
ing, Stanley Porter, Bernard Taylor, Jonathan Pennington, and I argued that
the category of deponency is a five hundred year-old error. Taylor in particular
demonstrated that it was introduced to Greek grammar through the widespread
latinization process of the Renaissance period. Taylor writes, “At least by the
Renaissance, Latin grammar and terminology had become the norm and were
used to describe and delimit other languages, not only within, but even beyond
the Indo-European family.”9 Indeed, the last one hundred and fifty years have
witnessed several corrections to our understanding of Greek grammar, overturn-
ing errors introduced through latinization. The traditional understanding of the
perfect likely fits this category of error. It cannot be found in the ancient Greek
grammarians such as Dionysius Thrax, and in that sense is no more “traditional”
than any other view presented in this volume; it is merely the oldest “modern”
view of the Greek perfect.
Thus, among the chief problems of the “traditional” view of the Greek per-
fect are the following issues: its semantic conception does not offer a compelling
explanation of the full usage of the perfect; when explanations are offered, the
semantics of the form frequently require cancellation; and it is likely an innova-
tion introduced by the latinization process of the Renaissance period, and there-
fore does not belong to the Greek language any more than deponency does. In
this respect, it does not deserve the title “traditional,” which misleads many into
thinking that it is the way in which the Greek perfect has always been under-
stood. We turn now to the stative aspect understanding of the Greek perfect.
2.2 Against Stative Aspect
Porter’s stative aspect understanding of the Greek perfect is developed from

the work of McKay and Louw,10 and avoids some of the problems of the
9 Bernard A. Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” in Biblical Greek Language

and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker (edited by Bernard
A. Taylor, John A. L. Lee, Peter R. Burton, and Richard E. E. Whitaker; Grand

Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 170–71.
10 K. L. McKay, A New Syntax of the Verb in the New Testament Greek: An Aspectual
Approach (Studies in Biblical Greek 5; New York: Peter Lang), 31; J. P. Louw, “Die
Semantiese Waarde van die Perfektum in Hellenistiese Grieks,” Acta Classica 10

(1967): 23–32. McKay employs the label “perfect aspect” when referring to the
The Greek Perfect 9
traditional view. For Porter, “The Perfect grammaticalizes the speaker’s

conception of the verbal process as a state or condition.”11 Rather than the
traditional view’s claim that the perfect encodes a past event with present con-
sequences (or a state resulting from the past event), stative aspect is entirely
stative. As such, those many perfects that do not appear to convey a past event
are better explained through stative aspect than through traditional accounts.
The stative aspect conception also avoids the theoretical problem of canceled
semantic values (see Section 2.1.2, above). Stative aspect, however, intro-
duces new problems at the theoretical level, as well as having some difficulty
in explaining certain types of perfect usage.
2.2.1 Stative Aspect Divorces Semantics from the Verbal Subject
Porter’s model of stative aspect parallels Wackernagel’s resultative perfect,

which regards stativity applying to the object of the verb rather than the sub-
ject. Porter has argued against the resultative perfect at length,13 but he has
12
nevertheless committed a parallel error—despite his objections to the con-

trary.14 Instead of attributing stativity to the subject of the verb, as a finite
verb should, Porter attributes stativity to “the state of affairs” or “the situa-
tion,” whatever that is. He thus divorces the semantic meaning of the perfect
from the subject of the verb in that the stativity of the perfect does not relate
to the subject of the verb, but rather to the surrounding situation. While
this view differs from the resultative perfect in that the latter views stativity
modifying the object of the verb, rather than the subject, it has in common
the idea that the semantics of the verb do not modify the subject. In effect,
the “subject” of Porter’s perfect is “everything,” that is, the state of affairs in
general. This contravenes the purpose of a finite verb, which (by definition) is
to indicate the action or state of a specified subject. If one wishes to convey a
verbal idea without specifying a subject, the Greek infinitive is ready at hand.
perfect form in order to avoid terminological confusion, but his understanding of the
“perfect” aspect is stative: McKay, A New Syntax, 31ff. Ironically, this term can easily
be confused with “perfective aspect.”
11 Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament with Reference to
Tense and Mood (Studies in Biblical Greek 1; New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 257.
12 See my Verbal Aspect, 163–66, 169–72.

13 Porter, Verbal Aspect, 273–81.
14 Stanley E. Porter, “Greek Linguistics and Lexicography,” in Understanding the
Times: New Testament Studies in the 21st Century. Essays in Honor of D. A. Carson
on the Occasionof his 65th Birthday (eds. Andreas J. Köstenberger and Robert
W. Yarbrough; Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 47–48.
2.2.2 Transitive Lexemes Are a Case in Point
In relation to the previous point, transitive lexemes are poorly accommodated

by Porter’s stative aspect. The problem with transitive lexemes for any ver-
sion of stative aspect is that they do not permit stativity to be attributed to
their subjects. These perfects are traditionally classed “aoristic-perfects”; they
simply denote an action involving a transference of energy, with the subject
performing said transference. It is implausible that any kind of stativity is
attributed to the subject of such verbs. Thus, Porter analyzes these perfects
as communicating stativity of the situation, rather than the subject. This is an
unconvincing analysis of Greek perfects with transitive lexemes.
2.2.3 Stativity Is Not an Aspect
For the wider linguistic world, stativity is not regarded as an aspectual value—
at least not in the way we are using the term “aspect” to refer to viewpoint
aspect. Porter has objected to this observation, citing a number of general
linguists who, he claims, support the notion of stative aspect. I will respond
to this objection below, but for now I restate my original observation: only
in Greek studies is stativity regarded a viewpoint aspect. A careful reading of
the literature strongly suggests that the conception of “stative aspect” rep-
resents a misunderstanding of aspect. Viewpoint aspect is a binary opposi-
tion of internal and external viewpoints, or imperfective and perfective aspect.
Only by using the term “aspect” to refer to something other than viewpoint,
such as lexical aspect, or procedural aspect—neither of which concerns view-
point—will we find anything other than this binary opposition.
We will return to the problems of Porter’s approach in §4 below, but first
I will address some misconceptions about imperfective aspect and identify
some of its strengths in explaining the functions of the Greek perfect.
3. The Imperfective Perfect

I have argued that the Greek perfect is, in fact, imperfective in aspect, fol-
lowing T. V. Evans.15 There are several strands of evidence that point in this
direction, the most significant being the perfect’s functions in text, both at
micro and macro levels. At the micro level, the widespread stative function of
15 See T. V. Evans, Verbal Syntax of the Greek Pentateuch: Natural Greek Usage and
Hebrew Interference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30–32. Cf. also his
“Future Directions for Aspect Studies in Ancient Greek,” in Biblical Greek Language
and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker (eds. Bernard A. Taylor,
John A. L. Lee, Peter R. Burton, and Richard E. Whitaker; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2004), 206.
The Greek Perfect 11
the perfect should be interpreted as an Aktionsart expression of imperfective

aspect, not a third, stative, aspect (contra Porter).16 Any past temporal refer-
ence that accompanies stative expression is regarded as a result of lexeme in
context (contra Fanning).17 At the macro level, the perfect indicative is very
clearly a discourse tense-form, overlapping with the present indicative.18 Even
when the perfect is not found in discourse contexts, occurring rarely on the
mainline of narratives, for example, this function parallels the same function
of the Greek present.19 The most likely explanation for the tight parallels
between the perfect and present indicative tense-forms is that they share the
same aspectual value.
3.1 Clearing Misconceptions
Judging from formal and informal responses about my previous work on the
Greek perfect, in which I have argued that it conveys imperfective aspect, it
is evident that two misconceptions in particular ought to be cleared before
addressing some of the strengths of this understanding of the semantic nature
of the perfect.
3.1.1 Imperfective Aspect Does Not Mean “in progress”
The imperfective aspect of the Greek perfect will be harder to accept if one
misunderstands imperfective aspect. It is commonplace to describe imperfec-
tive aspect as “progressive.” That is, imperfective aspect is understood to view
an action in progress. This, however, is mistaken. Imperfective aspect is the
internal viewpoint; it is used to portray an action from the inside. Progression
is but one function of imperfective aspect; it is not what imperfective aspect
means. This can be seen clearly with Greek present indicatives that convey sta-
tivity. Lexemes such as γινώσκω and ζάω do not convey an action in progress,
or a process of any kind—even as present indicatives. They simply convey a
state: I know and I live. This very common use of the Greek present indicative
demonstrates that not all Greek presents are progressive. To claim other-
wise is to conflate a pragmatic function of the present form with its semantic
meaning.
In evaluating whether or not the Greek perfect encodes imperfective
aspect, we must be clear on how imperfective aspect is to be understood. If
16 See my Verbal Aspect, 187–89; cf. 166–75.

17 Evans, Verbal Syntax, 30.
18 I will not pursue this line of argumentation further in this essay, but see my Verbal
Aspect, 175–87.
19 See my Verbal Aspect, 208–209.
one mistakenly thinks that imperfective aspect is progressive, one may reject
imperfective aspect as an explanation for the Greek perfect, since progression
is not an obvious function of the form. In fact, most perfects are stative.
Imperfective aspect does not suggest that they are in fact progressive; rather
imperfective aspect is the natural means by which to convey stativity.
3.1.2 “Heightened proximity” Is a Familiar Idea with Novel Nomenclature
I will return to this issue below, but I freely acknowledge that I have invented
the term “heightened proximity” to describe the difference between the Greek
perfect and the present. Both forms express imperfective aspect according to
my model of the verbal system, and the spatial metaphor of heightened prox-
imity distinguishes these two imperfectives in meaning and function. While
I have invented the term “heightened proximity,” the concept it seeks to
convey is not novel. Prominence and intensification are conveyed in several
languages through morphological indicators. An obvious example for this
readership is from Hebrew. The Piel and Pual binyanim are widely recog-
nized as expressing intensification of the basic Qal binyan.20 This function is
reflected in the morphology of both binyanim through the strengthening of
the second root letter—doubling occurs through gemination (indicated by
dagesh forte).
21 The notion of heightened proximity, issuing the functions of
prominence and intensification, and reflected by the morphological redupli-

cation of the perfect system, is not linguistically novel.22
3.2 Imperfective Aspect and Perfect Usage
We turn now to consider some of the strengths of an imperfective aspect

understanding of the Greek perfect.
20 W. Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (ed. E. Kautzsch; trans. A. E. Cowley;

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), 141–43; A. B. Davidson, An Introductory
Hebrew Grammar with Progressive Exercises in Reading, Writing and Pointing (25th
ed.; revised by John Mauchline; Edinburgh: T&T Clark), 105–107; Moshe Greenberg,
Introduction to Hebrew (Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 58–59; Menahem
Mansoor, Biblical Hebrew Step-by-Step (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980),
191–92; Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (London: Darton,
Longman and Todd, 1973), 194; C. L. Seouw, A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (rev.
ed.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 174; Allen P. Ross, Introducing Biblical Hebrew
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 193–97, 200–203.
21 In referring to Hebrew, I am not claiming that there is some kind of interdepen-
dence, or derived relationship, between Greek and Hebrew; I am simply pointing out
that the concept of intensification of verbal meaning through morphology may be
observed in other languages.
22 This issue will be addressed again, in Section 4.1 below.
3.2.1 Imperfective A spect Is the Natural Bearer of Stative Aktionsart
It is uncontroversial to assert that imperfective aspect is the natural bearer

of stative Aktionsart. As Carl Bache observes, in “most languages imperfec-
tive forms are typically used to refer to [stative] situations.”23 Comrie also
notes that the combination of stativity and imperfective aspect is natural.24 As
Szemerényi indicates, “If the Greek perfect expressed a state resulting from a
past action, then it is quite clearly, normally, a representative of imperfective
aspect, and not a different kind of thing.”25 Thus, to find an abundance of
stative Greek perfects, as we all do, should be regarded as evidence that points
to imperfective aspect, rather than any other aspect.
3.2.2 Imperfective Aspect Is Sufficiently Broad to Explain the Variety of
Perfect Uses
Imperfective aspect is able to account for the full spectrum of usage of the
Greek perfect. We have already established that it naturally conveys stative
Aktionsart. This accounts for the majority of Greek perfect usage. Those per-
fects that, in context, indicate a past action from which the state arises is com-
fortably accommodated by imperfective aspect, as we see from the usage of
the Greek present indicative, which is imperfective in aspect and can perform
the same function. Even those perfects that appear to be “aoristic,” namely
perfects with transitive lexemes, may be explained through imperfective
aspect. These are no different from the present indicative phenomenon of the
historical present; while imperfective in aspect, certain lexical groups are used
in past-referring contexts. So too the perfect. So-called “aoristic” perfects are,

in fact, historical perfects, and function in parallel to historical presents.
3.2.3 Imperfective Aspect Fits the Morphology of the Greek Perfect
Three things are widely accepted about the origins of the Greek perfect: it
developed out of the Greek present tense-form; the perfect represented an
intensification of the Greek present; and the morphology of reduplication
originally signaled intensification. Georg Curtius says that “the perfect indic-
ative was originally nothing but a particular kind of present formation. As
a reduplicated present with an intensive meaning this form separated itself
from the present-stem and became by degrees an independent member in
23 Carl Bache, “Aspect and Aktionsart: Towards a Semantic Distinction,” Journal of

Linguistics 18 (1982): 69.
24 Bernard Comrie, Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related
Problems (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics; Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976), 51.

25 Oswald Szemerényi, “The Origin of Aspect in the Indo-European Languages,” Glotta
65 (1987): 10.
the system of verbal forms, with a distinctive stamp of its own.” 26 He later
adds, “[W]e have seen repeatedly that the original force of the reduplication
was intensive and that the perfect was a present to start with. [… ] We have
had reason to think that the perfect was originally nothing but an intensive
present.”27 A. T. Robertson later reflects the consensus indicated by Curtius
by acknowledging that the intensive use of the perfect “was probably the
origin of the tense.”28 He adds, “Reduplication, though not always used,
was an effort to express this intensive or iterative idea.” 29 More recently, Basil
Mandilaras regards the perfect’s morphological reduplication as expressive of
intensification,30 as does Sara Kimball.31
Lest anyone think it silly that the Greek perfect might be related to the
present, expressing imperfective aspect and creating an opposition of intensi-
fication, a number of scholars acknowledge that this was, indeed, the original
meaning of the perfect. It is my contention that what we know about the
origins of the Greek perfect, and what its morphology originally represented,
ought to inform our understanding of its meaning and function in the Koine
period. It is not far-fetched to expect that the semantics of the Greek per-
fect through the Koine period might stand in continuity with its original
development.
3.3.4 Imperfective Aspect Can Explain the Diachronic Development of the
Greek Perfect
Since older grammarians recognized that the Greek perfect began life as a
type of present, what shall we say about the general consensus that the syn-
thetic perfect eventually merged with the aorist? First, it is worth noting that
neither the traditional view, nor the stative aspect understanding, offer com-
pelling explanations for the oft-observed tendency for perfects to become
interchangeable with aorists during the later Koine period. How does a stative
aspect tense-form turn into a perfective form? No one really can say. My alter-
native suggestion is as follows. While the observation is correct—that perfects
increasingly are found in contexts in which we would normally expect to see
aorists—the interpretation of this phenomenon is incorrect. The increase of
26 Georg Curtius, The Greek Verb: Its Structure and Development (trans. Augustus
S. Wilkins and Edwin B. England; London: John Murray, 1880), 354–55.
27 Curtius, The Greek Verb , 376, 382.
28 A. T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical
Research (4th ed.; Nashville: Broadman, 1934), 893.
29 Robertson, Grammar, 893.

30 Basil G. Mandilaras, The Verb in the Greek Non-Literary Papyri (Athens: Hellenistic
Ministry of Culture and Sciences, 1973), 205.
31 Sara E. Kimball, “The Origin of the Greek k-perfect,” Glotta 69 (1991): 144–46.
perfects being found in aorist-dominated contexts can readily be explained as

an increase in the use of the historical perfect.
Following Martín Ruipérez, I argue that perfects that seem to refer to
past events, without viewing “ongoing consequences,” are parallel with the
historical present in function.
32 As we know, the historical present is most
commonly found in contexts in which we expect to find aorists, namely on

the mainline of narratives. While scholars do not regard this frequent use of
the present as a “collapsing” into the aorist, nevertheless our translations ren-
der them as though aorists because in English we have but little choice. Thus
an interpretation of the historical present based on translation would con-
clude that the present has become aoristic—but we know better, privileging
the semantics of the form over translation. Why, then, when we observe per-
fects following the same pattern—being found on the mainline of narratives,
apparently interchangeable with aorists—would we assume that such perfects
have become aoristic? Rather than conclude that the perfect merges into an
aorist, it is better to understand the phenomenon as an increased use of the
historical perfect. Since the historical perfect parallels the historical present,
both sharing imperfective aspect and using similar lexemes, the diachronic
development of the perfect—from originally paralleling the Greek present
to finally paralleling the historical present—is comfortably accommodated
through imperfective aspect.
In this way, imperfective aspect has greater power of explanation than
other views regarding the diachronic evolution and devolution of the Greek
perfect. With stative aspect, for example, the disappearance of the perfect
must mean that a whole aspect drops out of use in the Greek language. Once
the perfect (and pluperfect) disappears from the language, Greek must there-
fore restructure itself from a three-aspect to a two-aspect verbal system, as it is
today. This then would represent a very significant alteration to the structure
of the language, going well beyond the simple devolution of a particular verb
form. I, for one, find it much more plausible to suggest that the language has
always been a two-aspect system, from its early origins, through the Koine
period, and to this day. The devolution of the perfect, then, is simply the dis-
appearance of a form that ultimately becomes redundant, since its functions
can be assumed by the present tense-form, both in its stative and “historical”
expressions.
32 So Ruipérez claims, ‘la existencia de un perfecto histórico paralelo al presente histórico’;

Martín S. Ruipérez, Estructura del sistema de aspectos y tiempos del verbo griego anti-
guo: Análisis funcional sincrónico (Theses et Studia Philologica Salmanticensia 7;
Salamanca: Colegio Trilingüe de la Universidad, 1954), 153. See also my Verbal

Aspect, 182, 187.
4. An Imperfect Critique: Responding to Porter

The following is a response to Porter’s critique of this analysis of the Greek
perfect, published in the 2011 Festschrift for D. A. Carson. I am not able to
address every point here, but will respond at some length for two reasons.
First, this represents the most serious critique of my position to date; and
second, by engaging the critique, it will become further evident that some
serious flaws mar Porter’s approach.
4.1 Against “heightened proximity”
An inevitable question arising from understanding the Greek perfect as

imperfective in aspect is its distinction from the present indicative. I argue
for a spatial distinction, such that the present tense-form is imperfective with
the spatial value of proximity, while the perfect is imperfective with height-
ened proximity. I understand why such terminology is controversial. The cre-
ation of terminology is risky, since it can appear that the concept it labels is
not known elsewhere in the literature. But it is a truism that linguists fre-
quently create terminology to speak of categories already known; the reason
for doing such is that existing terminology is found to be deficient. I created
the term “heightened proximity” because other terms, such as prominence or
markedness, were not sharp enough. Nevertheless, the fact that other scholars
recognize “heightened proximity” as roughly comparable to “prominence”
demonstrates that I have not invented a new concept, but have coined new
terminology for an old one. A disappointing aspect of Porter’s critique is
that he ridicules the idea of heightened proximity,33 but later claims that
the category roughly corresponds with his own analysis: “What [Campbell]
appears to be saying, at the end of his analysis, regardless of what other words
are used to describe and label the forms, is that the perfect tense form is a
marked form in relation to the present tense form.”34 Porter then admits,
“Observant readers will note that, in fact, that is what my systemic analysis of
the Greek verbal system, beginning with the formal evidence of the language,
concluded from the start.”35 In fact, several Greek scholars have endorsed a
concept roughly equivalent to heightened proximity. These include Curtius,36
33 Porter, “Greek Linguistics,” 53.

36 Curtius, Greek Verb , 354–55, 376, 382.
Smyth,37 Burton,38 Robertson,39 Hartmann,40 Rijksbaron,41 Hatina,42 and

Sauge.43
4.2 Linguists Who Endorse Stative Aspect
Earlier in this essay I claimed that stativity is not regarded as an aspectual

value within general linguistics. Porter attempts to undermine the claim by
reference to several scholars, who, he says, endorse the notion of a stative
aspect. I will demonstrate that these references are disingenuous. First, Porter
lists some Greek linguists who have endorsed the notion of stative aspect.44
This is hardly relevant, since it is the consensus within Greek studies that
I am challenging by reference to the wider world of linguistics. In any case,
we may simply cite a different list of Greek scholars who reject the notion of
stative aspect. Such a list would include Buist Fanning, Trevor Evans, Martín
Ruipérez, Mari Broman Olsen, and Basil Mandilaras, to mention a few.45
37 Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar (revised by Gordon M. Messing;

Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1920), 435: “Certain verbs tend to appear in the
perfect for emphasis.”
38 Ernest de Witt Burton, Syntax of the Mood and Tenses in New Testament Greek (3rd
ed.; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1900; repr., Grand Rapids: Kregel,
1976), 38.
39 Robertson, Grammar, 893, 96–97.
40 Hans Hartmann, „Zur Funktion des Perfekts: Eine strukturelle Betrachtung,” in
Festschrift B. Snell: Zum 60. Geburtstag am 18. Juni 1956 von Freunden und Schülern
überreicht (Munich: Beck, 1956), 246.
41 Albert Rijksbaron, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek: An
Introduction (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1984), 36.
42 Thomas R. Hatina, “The Perfect Tense-Form in Colossians: Verbal Aspect,

Temporality and the Challenge of Translation,” in Translating the Bible: Problems and
Prospects (ed. Stanley E. Porter and Richard S. Hess; JSNTS 173; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1999), 249–50.

43 André Sauge, Les degrés du verbe: sens et formation du parfait en grec ancien
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 104.
45 Buist M. Fanning, “Approaches to Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek: Issues
in Definition and Method,” in Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open
Questions in Current Research (ed. Stanley E. Porter and D. A. Carson; JSNTS 80;
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 49–50; Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 117;
T. V. Evans, “Future Directions,” 206; Ruipérez, Aspectos, 60; Mari Broman Olsen,
A Semantic and Pragmatic Model of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect (Outstanding
Dissertations in Linguistics; New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 259–60; Basil

Mandilaras, The Verb in the Greek Non-Literary Papyri (Athens: Hellenistic Ministry
of Culture and Sciences, 1973), 205.
Second, Porter lists the general linguists who, he claims, endorse the
notion of stative aspect: Mitchell and El-Hassan, Michaelis, Verkuyl, Clackson,
and Lyons.46 These scholars do not in fact endorse his position. On the con-
trary, they speak against it.
Let us consider Michaelis. In the section that Porter references, Michaelis
sounds promising for Porter’s claim: “In this section, we will investigate an
aspectual property attributed to the general perfect construction: stativity.”
The trouble is that Michaelis does not mean what Porter says she means; in
fact, a reading of her whole book indicates that she means the opposite.
Michaelis elsewhere asserts that stativity is conveyed by imperfective
aspect: “An event predication evokes an ‘external’ viewpoint [… ]. By con-
trast, a state predication evokes an ‘internal’ viewpoint, whereby boundar-
ies are not countenanced.”47 Also, “Imperfectively described situations (also
known as states ) obtain throughout the interval at issue, possibly overflowing
the boundaries of that interval.”48

Michaelis regards stativity as conveyed by imperfective aspect, and she
believes in two aspects, not three: “I follow Smith (1986, 1991) in using the
label viewpoint aspect as a cover term for the aspectual categories imperfective
and perfective.”49 With respect to what she calls “viewpoint aspect.” Michaelis
clearly accepts only two aspects.
She does, however, acknowledge other aspectual systems: situation aspect
and phasal aspect. In the section that Porter cites, Michaelis refers to stativity
as a situation aspect, which, in her own words, is equivalent to Aktionsart.50
If one reads the whole of Michaelis’ work, it becomes clear that she does
not support stativity as a viewpoint aspect. There are only two viewpoint
aspects—perfective and imperfective—and stativity is expressed through
imperfective aspect.
Let us consider Verkuyl. Porter cites Verkuyl, p.11, as evidence of a gen-
eral linguist who endorses the notion of stative aspect.51 However, on p.11
of Verkuyl, there is no mention of stative aspect, or even of stativity at all—
nor does the entire chapter mention stative aspect. On the contrary, through
the section pp. 34–68, Verkuyl consistently discusses stativity as a Vendlerian
class—meaning that he regards stativity as a lexical property. While Verkuyl
46 Porter, “Greek Linguistics,” 48–49.

47 Laura A. Michaelis, Aspectual Grammar and Past-Time Reference (London: Routledge,
1998), 7.
48 Michaelis, Aspectual Grammar, 17 [emphasis added].
49 Michaelis, Aspectual Grammar, 59.
50 Michaelis, Aspectual Grammar, 58.
frequently refers to Vendlerian categories as aspectual classes, this describes

lexical distinctions, not viewpoint aspect.
Furthermore, Verkuyl says, “States, Process and (terminative) Events are
construed by combining semantic information expressed by the verb with
semantic information expressed by its argument NP(s) [noun phrase(s)].”52
In other words, stativity is expressed through the combination of the seman-
tics of a verb with its context. We would refer to this as Aktionsart.
Later, Verkuyl argues that stativity is conveyed by durative aspect—what
we would call imperfective aspect: “the distinction between terminative and
durative aspect gives speakers the means to encode their wish to speak about
(terminative) events, or (unbounded) processes, or about states.”53 Stativity
is conveyed by imperfective aspect.
Let us consider Mitchell and El–Hassan.54 Porter claims that they endorse
the notion of stative viewpoint aspect, but such an endorsement cannot be
found in the pages cited by Porter, nor anywhere else in their book. References
to aspect are to lexical classes, not viewpoint aspect, and stativity is consis-
tently considered a lexical class. Mitchell and El–Hassan regard stativity as
a pragmatic class that can be expressed through the primary distinction of
“durativeness,” which, as they describe it, roughly corresponds to our imper-
fective aspect.55 They speak of a binary viewpoint aspectual system (“punctual
or undivided as opposed to what is extensive or durative”), 56 and stativity is
52 Henk J. Verkuyl, A Theory of Aspectuality: The Interaction between Temporal and
Atemporal Structure (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 64; Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993), 19.
53 Verkuyl, Aspectuality, 268–69.
54 T. F. Mitchell and Shahir El-Hassan, Modality, Mood and Aspect in Spoken Arabic with
Special Reference to Egypt and the Levant London: Kegan Paul International, 1994);
cf. Porter, “Greek Linguistics,” 48.

55 “The basic reason for the recognition of aspectual categories seems to be the contrast
that is recognizable in so many languages, however diversely it is manifested, between
what may be seen as punctual or undivided as opposed to what is extensive or dura-
tive, whether in time or space. Distinctions are perhaps most easily grasped from a
temporal viewpoint in accordance with which a threefold set of stages or phases or
uninterrupted acts, activities, events, processes, and states may be singled out and
labeled the inceptive or beginning phase, the progressive or continuing phase, and the
terminative or ending phase. [ … ] Durativeness is not only progressive but also, for
example, perfect (as in ‘He is wearing his new suit, he is still in the state of having done
so’), cognitive (‘He knows his French’), timeless or gnomic (‘The earth travels round
the sun’), etc. Such enduring states are seen from varying standpoints of changeless-
ness.” Mitchell and El-Hassan, Modality, Mood and Aspect, 65.
56 Mitchell and El-Hassan, Modality, Mood and Aspect, 65.
one of the functions of “durativeness.” In other words, stativity is a lexical

and pragmatic function of imperfective aspect.
Let us consider Clackson. Clackson’s book on Indo–European linguistics
simply reflects the consensus within Greek scholarship that the perfect stem
indicates stativity (which, by the way, he does not call an aspect). He does
not, therefore, constitute evidence from the wider linguistic world, as Porter
claims. In any case, Clackson indicates that Greek has four different tense-as-
pect stems.57
Since Porter claims that three verbal stems indicate three aspects,
Clackson presents a problem—there are four! According to Porter, the
future tense-form does not indicate aspect at all, but this claim contradicts
his argument that morphological verb stems indicate separate aspectual val-
ues. He contravenes his own methodology by asserting that the fourth stem,
the future, does not indicate aspect. Thus, Clackson presents two options. If
Porter’s methodology is right—that each distinct verb stem indicates its own
aspect—then Porter is wrong: there are four aspects in Greek, not three. If
Porter is wrong—and distinct verb stems do not necessarily indicate their own
aspects—then Porter is wrong to assert a third aspect for the perfect system
on this basis.
While speaking of Indo-European scholars, Albert Lloyd applies linguis-
tic theory directly to IE, with specific reference to Greek, to show that the
proposal of a third aspect represents a misunderstanding of aspect: “Attempts
by Kuryłowicz (1964, 90ff.) and others to identify the IE perfect as a third
aspect, contrasting with the ‘perfective’ (aorist stem) and ‘imperfective’
(present stem) are not consistent with the basic function aspect and must be
rejected.”58 Kuryłowicz, here cited negatively by Lloyd, actually changed his
mind on this very point. Despite having defended the three-aspect system
in Greek for most of his career, he eventually concluded that the traditional
distinction of three aspects corresponding to the system present–aorist–per-
fect is evidently false. Indeed, according to Szemerényi, the assumption of
59
three aspects was carried over from analyses of Slavic aspect, and there is little
57 James Clackson, Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks

in Linguistics; Cambridge University Press, 2007), 117.
58 Albert L. Lloyd, Anatomy of the Verb (Studies in Language Companion Series 4;
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1979), 117–18.
59 “La distinction traditionnelle de trois aspects correspondant au système i.e. présent–
aoriste–parfait est évidemment fausse.” Jerzy Kuryłowicz, Problèmes de linguis-
tique indo-européenne (Polska Akademia Nauk Komitet J ęzykoznawstwa; Prace
Językoznawcze 90; Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossoli ńskich, 1977), 60

[italics are original].
justification for the view that the Greek perfect represents an independent
aspect.60
Finally, let us consider Lyons. According to Porter, Lyons says that “there
may well be languages that grammaticalize stative aspect.”61 But what does
Lyons actually say? Even in the text that Porter cites, Lyons does not say
that some languages might grammaticalize stative aspect. Lyons actually says,
“Whether a language grammaticalizes either stativity or progressivity (or
both, or neither) is something that cannot be predicted.”62 Lyons says that
stativity could be grammaticalized in a language; he does not endorse such a
thing as stative aspect.

Lyons does, however, elsewhere refer to stative aspect, but what does he
mean by this? As with the previous scholars Porter cites, Lyons does not mean
viewpoint aspect, but rather Aktionsart. He refers to Aktionsart on p.706,
and after critiquing the label states, “[W]e will make no further use of the
term ‘Aktionsart.’ ” Note carefully what Lyons says next: “We will introduce
instead the term ‘aspectual character’. The aspectual character of a verb, or
more simply its character, will be that part of its meaning whereby it (nor-
mally) denotes one kind of situation rather than another.”63 From this point,
whenever Lyons refers to stativity, he does so as a property of aspectual char-
acter, meaning Aktionsart. When Porter quotes Lyons as saying, “Stativity,
then, is lexicalized, rather than grammaticalized, in English,” he omits the
remainder of the sentence, “it [stativity] is part of the aspectual character of
particular verbs.”64 “Aspectual character” means Aktionsart, and stativity is
this kind of feature. Porter then resumes the quote: “Whether a language
grammaticalizes either stativity or progressivity [ … ] is something that cannot
be predicted in advance of an empirical investigation of the grammatical and
semantic structure of the language.”65 Now we are in a position to understand
Lyons’ meaning. He means that the Aktionsart quality of stativity could, in
theory, be grammaticalized. Actually, this is Fanning’s position—the Greek
perfect semantically encodes perfective aspect and stative Aktionsart. Lyons
does not endorse the notion of a third, stative, viewpoint aspect.
To conclude this section, we may make several observations. First, a close
reading of the scholars whom Porter cites in approval of a third, stative, view-
point aspect, shows that they do not in fact endorse even the possibility of such
60 Szemerényi, “Origin,” 10.

62 John Lyons, Semantics (vol. 2; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 707.
63 Lyons, Semantics, 706.
64 Lyons, Semantics, 707; cf. Porter, “Greek Linguistics,” 49.
65 Lyons, Semantics, 707; cf. Porter, “Greek Linguistics,” 49.
a notion. Second, most of these scholars explicitly endorse the conviction that
there are only two viewpoint aspects in languages—perfective and imperfec-
tive. Third, all of these scholars regard stativity as an Aktionsart, or lexical,
value, even if their terminology differs. Fourth, my critique, therefore, still
stands: the notion of a stative viewpoint aspect has not been found outside
Greek scholarship. Fifth, either Porter’s method is right, but his conclusions
are therefore wrong—because there are four verb stems in Greek, not three—
or Porter’s method and conclusions are wrong—because it is methodolog-
ically flawed to assert that the number of verb stems indicates the number
of aspects. This observation leads to my final section, scrutinizing Porter’s
methodology further.
4.3 Linguistic Method
Porter declares that several of my methodological steps are contrary to “lin-

guistic method.” He fails, however, to indicate which linguistic method-
ological principles are being transgressed. We might assume the linguistic
methodology he has in mind is “minimalist formalized semantics.” Let us
turn, then, to consider this methodology.
Porter’s approach is deductive and based on assumption. Read carefully
the following sentences:
Observant readers will note that, in fact, that is what my systemic analysis of the
Greek verbal system, beginning with the formal evidence of the language, con-
cluded from the start.
Here, Porter admits that his conclusions were formed “from the start.”
On what basis? On the basis that there are three stems in the Greek verbal sys-
tem. Three stems must indicate three aspects. After all, this has been assumed
since Georg Curtius in the mid-nineteenth century. But why do three stems
indicate three aspects? What if they indicate something else? How would you
know, apart from examination of the empirical evidence? Sadly, Porter’s scorn
for an attempted inductive approach is plain:
In other words, Campbell has apparently pursued a series of misleading trails sim-
ply to arrive at a conclusion that is very similar to the one that I arrived at earlier.
The major difference is that I began with morphology and ended with a workable
aspectual system in line with a minimalist formalized semantics.
Porter has admitted to a serious error for functional linguistics: a top-down

approach based on presuppositions about morphology rather than usage.
Finally, Porter’s last sentences (cited partially), by which he intended to
put the nail in my coffin, has, I submit, shot himself in the foot:

[Campbell] has approached the entire topic backwards, ending with what should
have been an initial, fundamental morphological distinction. As a result, he
has not presented an analysis of the Greek verbal system that is linguistically
grounded.
Functional linguistics prioritizes usage of language, discerned through

inductive methodologies. While he claims otherwise, Porter’s approach does
not belong to functional linguistics, but to formal linguistics, which is charac-
terized as top–down, formalized, and presuppositional.
Allow me to draw an analogy from hermeneutics. Biblical scholars have
long lamented the phenomenon of reading our theological systems into the
text of the New Testament. And yet, it is impossible to read any text apart
from the worldview and presuppositions that one brings to the text. The
reader ought to approach the text with epistemic humility, understanding
that theological convictions will shape our reading of the New Testament, but
that we should be open enough to allow the text to shape, refine, and some-
times challenge our systems. If we allow the text to shape our theology, then
our next reading will less likely distort the text. This principle has become
known as the hermeneutical spiral.66 Our theology is shaped by text, which
is shaped by theology, which is shaped by text. Our system should change to
reflect the text, rather than the other way around.
Porter criticizes me for wanting the text to inform my understanding of
the aspectual system. But his approach is to establish his system first, on the
basis of morphology, then read the text. This is contrary to the analogy of the
hermeneutical spiral. It is, rather, a deductive, top–down approach, which any
New Testament scholar should regard as dubious.
5. Conclusion
Imperfective aspect provides stronger power of explanation than the tradi-
tional view and the notion of stative aspect. This is concluded on the basis of
the usage of the perfect, as determined by context (not translation), both on a
sentential level, and on the wider level of distribution. Imperfective aspect fits
the morphology of the perfect, since reduplication indicates intensification
of the present stem. Imperfective aspect also explains the diachronic devel-
opment, and eventual disappearance, of the synthetic perfect from the Greek
language.
66 Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Guide to Biblical

Interpretation (revised and expanded ed.; Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity, 2006).
It cannot be argued that imperfective aspect fails to explain the textual

usage of the perfect, since it explains its usage extremely well. It cannot be
argued that the frequent stative function of the Greek perfect rules out imper-
fective aspect, since stativity is conveyed through imperfective aspect. It can-
not be argued that, because there are three verb stems, there must be three
aspects, since there are, in fact, four verb stems in the Greek system. Either
adopt a four–aspect system, or abandon the unproven presupposition that the
number of verb stems indicates the number of aspects. It cannot be argued
that imperfective aspect contravenes wider linguistic principles, since every-
one else agrees there are only two aspects and stativity is an Aktionsart .
In conclusion, the imperfective aspect of the Greek perfect cannot be
challenged through appeal to its usage, through appeal to morphology,
through the diachronic development of the form, through linguistic meth-
odology, nor through wider linguistic consensus about stativity and aspect.
3. Response to Campbell’s Imperfective

View of the Greek Perfect
B UIST M. F ANNING
Campbell must be commended for taking a view of the ancient Greek perfect
that is out of the mainstream and defending it energetically and widely. His
academic books and essays on the topic—and perhaps more importantly his
popular book introducing verbal aspect—have placed his view of the perfect
unmistakably in the spotlight.1 His reading of the perfect as encoding imper-
fective aspect has a certain degree of plausibility on the face of it, even if it has
not been championed more widely. This general plausibility does not hold
up, however, when examined more carefully, as I will try to show in the first
part of my response. Campbell’s other line of argument for his view consists
of tracing the problems that other approaches face in giving a unified descrip-
tion of the perfect’s semantic value. These problems involve methodological
debates as well as disagreement over the sense of the perfect in actual texts
and the range of meanings it is said to express. I will address these issues later
in my response.
1 Constantine R. Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative: Soundings
in the Greek of the New Testament (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Verbal Aspect
and Non-Indicative Verbs: Further Soundings in the Greek of the New Testament
(New York: Peter Lang, 2008); “Finished the Race? 2 Timothy 4:6–7 and Verbal
Aspect,” in Donald Robinson Selected Works: Appreciation (ed. Peter Bolt and Mark
Thompson; Camperdown, NSW: Australian Church Record, 2008), 169–75;
“Breaking Perfect Rules: The Traditional Understanding of the Greek Perfect,”
in Discourse Studies and Biblical Interpretation: A Festschrift in Honor of Stephen
H. Levinsohn (ed. Steven E. Runge; Bellingham, WA: Logos, 2011), 139–55; Basics
of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).
26 B UIST M. F ANNING
1. The Greek Perfect as Imperfective: A Plausible Approach?

At various places Campbell defends the view of the perfect as imperfective
aspect by showing its general plausibility despite this not being a widely
accepted approach. For example, it must be plausible because other reputable
scholars have espoused this approach—it is not his view alone. So he cites
instances of other scholars who have supported this position in one form or
another: Evans, Curtius, and Szemerényi.2 Perhaps a few others could be
listed as well, but left unsaid is that this is far and away a minority view among
scholars who study the ancient Greek perfect from an aspectual approach. Of
course, such questions cannot be decided by majority vote.
Campbell makes much of the parallels between the present (imperfective)
and perfect in their discourse co-occurrence. The perfect occurs most often
in spoken discourse rather than as a narrative tense, and since this is true of
the present indicative as well, “this fact alone immediately aligns the perfect
with the present indicative” rather than with the aorist.3 He is certainly cor-
rect about the typical genre occurrences for these forms, but that in itself is
a poor argument for assigning the Greek perfect to imperfective aspect. The
co-occurrence pattern is due to the shared temporal value of the present and
perfect indicative (present time), not to a shared aspectual sense. In addition,
attributing imperfective aspect to the perfect offers a weak explanation for the
diachronic shift in which the perfect merged into the aorist. See discussion of
this in the final section below.
To support the plausibility of his view Campbell also uses morphological
evidence, particularly a certain construal of the significance of reduplication
in the perfect forms. Following Curtius, he takes the perfect’s reduplication
to denote intensity and also to connect it to the present, which displays some
reduplicated roots.4 So the perfect “developed out of the Greek present-tense
form,”5 and “the original meaning of the perfect in its entirety was intensive.”
2 See Campbell essay, 10–13, especially p. 13; 2007, 186, 189; Campbell, Basics, 50.
In Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative, he calls Curtius “the
father of Greek verbal aspectual analysis” while citing his support.
3 Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative, 184–87; quotation
from 184; see also 175.
4 Ibid., 199–200, 231, citing Georg Curtius, The Greek Verb: Its Structure and
Development (trans. Augustus S. Wilkins and Edward B. England; London: John
Murray, 1880), 354–55. Campbell cites Sara E. Kimball, “The Origin of the Greek
κ-Perfect,” Glotta 69 (1991): 141–53, for this point as well, but she says nothing
about intensity or reduplication. Her argument, somewhat related, is that the—κ—in
the perfect and—κ—in the aorist formation are separate morphemes.
5 Campbell, essay, 7.
Campbell’s Imperfective View of the Greek Perfect 27
This is then taken as a telling critique of the standard account of the Greek
perfect’s diachronic evolution (to be discussed below).6 But alternative (post-
1880) views of reduplication should be considered. Bybee, Perkins, and
Pagliuca, for example, find cross-linguistic evidence that reduplication is most
likely associated originally with repetition (including senses like iterative, fre-
quentative, and continuative) and that this often morphs into more general
meanings like durative, stative, or intransitive/passive.7 In this latter sense
reduplication can change a transitive (e.g., plant, do) into an “inactive” or sta-
tive (be planted, “be in a state of having been done”). It is possible then that
the Greek perfect may have originated as an imperfective but developed away
from that sense over time. See the final section below for further discussion of
Campbell’s reading of NT perfects as “intensive.”
A final line of argument for the imperfective meaning of the perfect is to
assert its “inherent suitability” for conveying a stative sense, especially in its
use with verbs that have a lexically stative meaning (e.g., know, see, stand, be).
According to Campbell, if a verb carries a stative sense lexically, the imper-
fective aspect naturally gives attention to its stativity, “since it views verbal
occurrences internally as they unfold … [and] does not portray verbal occur-
rences with either the beginning or end of such occurrences in view.”8 This is
certainly true and is widely acknowledged in recent aspect studies. But such
a point alone is a narrowly limited slice of this line of analysis. Campbell does
not round out the argument and consider related implications. For example,
what sense typically results when the imperfective aspect (e.g., Greek presents
and imperfects) combines with verbs of other lexical types besides statives?9
A further question is how a lexically stative verb in the Greek perfect
can refer (as an imperfective) to the prior action that produced the state in
6 Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative, 200.

7 Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca, The Evolution of Grammar: Tense,
Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 166–74; see also D. N. Shankara Bhat, The Prominence of Tense, Aspect
and Mood (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 55–57, 127; Eduard Schwyzer,
Syntax und syntaktische Stilistik (vol. 2 of Griechische Grammatik; ed. Albert
Debrunner; Munich: C. H. Beck, 1950), 263; and Andreas Willi, The Languages of
Aristophanes: Aspects of Linguistic Variation in Classical Attic Greek (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 129.

8 Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative, 187; essay, 6.
9 I touch on a few questions like these in my essay, pp. 64, 68-69. This would include
verbs like die, give, speak, come, go, send, fulfill/fill, raise/arise, justify, and so forth.
Campbell says ( Basics, 107), “sometimes the context can create a stative Aktionsart
even if the lexeme is not itself stative,” but he does not give a linguistically sound
explanation for this.
view.10 As Campbell himself notes (lines quoted in my previous paragraph),

imperfective aspect does not hold the beginning of the state in view in such
cases. On the other hand recent aspect studies consistently affirm that perfec-
tive aspect in combination with lexically stative verbs commonly produces an
ingressive sense: the combination refers to the action of entering the condi-
tion the verb denotes. 11 Campbell’s attempt to refute my claim in this regard
falls flat, since he argues the case using two Greek verbs that are not states but
activities: πάσχω, τηρέω .12
These issues with how actional characteristics (i.e., Aktionsart) combine
with imperfective aspect argue also against a related view of the Greek per-
fect: the idea that it displays a combination of perfective and imperfective
aspect. Like Campbell’s view, this one has a certain plausibility about it, since
one could say the Greek perfect behaves as a perfective in referring to an
action in summary but as an imperfective in paying attention to the state
or condition related to that action. But this makes the mistake of supposing
that a stative focus must be somehow aspectual.13 If the perfect possesses an
imperfective aspectual sense, we would expect its use with non-telic verbs of
action to focus on the activity in progress (no end point in view), and there
is no evidence for this.
Despite his awareness that imperfectives do not focus on beginning
points, Campbell thinks that imperfective aspect with stative verbs can in fact
refer to the past action leading to the state. He alludes to this possibility in
his essay (p. 6): “Those perfects that, in context, indicate a past action from
which the state arises are comfortably accommodated by imperfective aspect,
as we see from the usage of the Greek present indicative, which is imperfective
10 I raise this issue also in my essay (69). See also Robert Crellin, “The Greek Perfect
through Gothic Eyes: Evidence for the Existence of a Unitary Semantic for the Greek
Perfect in New Testament Greek,” Journal of Greek Linguistics 14 (2014): 13.
11 Bernard Comrie, Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related
Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 51; Carl Bache, “Aspect
and Aktionsart: Towards a Semantic Distinction,” Journal of Linguistics 18

(1982): 69; Carlota S. Smith, The Parameter of Aspect (2nd ed.; Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1997), 69–70; Dag Haug, “Aristotle’s Kinesis/Energeia-Test and the Semantics of
the Greek Perfect,” Linguistics 42 (2004): 403–4; 409–10.
12 Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative, 190–91. See Buist
M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
145; Crellin, “Greek Perfect through Gothic Eyes,” 25; BDAG, 1002.
13 Bhat, Prominence, 169–70; Randall Buth, “Verbs Perception and Aspect: Greek
Lexicography and Grammar,” in Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Essays in
Honor of Frederick W. Danker (ed. Bernard A. Taylor et al.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2004), 191–92.
in aspect and can perform the same function.” But as far as I can tell, he
does not discuss or illustrate how this comes about in any of his writings.
Presumably he means that present verbs like γινώσκω, θέλω, πιστεύω14 carry
some broad inference that if the state of knowledge, desire, or belief now
exists, it must have come about through some prior action that produced that
condition. But is this true for only some stative verbs or only some contextual
situations or does it carry over for all statives since it arises from real-world
implicature? It would be helpful for him to specify what contextual features
typically imply—or do not imply—an allusion to the prior occurrence for a
stative verb in the imperfective aspect.
This is an appropriate place to reflect on the passage in Aristotle’s
Metaphysics where he compares and contrasts two lexical classes of Greek
verbs occurring in present versus perfect forms (9.1048b, 18–35). He posits

an important distinction between verbs that have a limit or end (τέλος ) and
those that do not. The former he labels κινήσεις (movements, goal-oriented
actions) and the latter he labels ἐνέργειαι (workings, actualities). The sense of
the latter term is disputed because at the outset he seems to call both classes
“actions” (π ράξεις) but all his Greek illustrations are stative verbs (ὁράω,
φρονέω, νοέω, ζάω, εὐδαιμονέω). In terms of the Vendler-Kenny system, some
take ἐνέργειαι to mean activities (non-telic actions) and others take them as
states, both of which are unbounded in broad terms in contrast to telic verbs
of all types (performances, accomplishments, achievements). It seems best
to understand Aristotle’s ἐνέργειαι to denote states, since his examples are all
stative and he uses the term elsewhere to mean “realizations, actual effects.”15
What Aristotle says about ἐνέργειαι (states) is that the present tense of
such verbs presupposes or entails the perfect so that to express the present
is to affirm the perfect as well: “at the same time he sees and has come to
see, understands and has come to understand, thinks and has thought … .
He lives well and has come to live well, he is happy and has become happy,
at the same time” (Metaphysics 9.1048b, 23–26). To be in a state (present)
means that one has at some point entered or was brought into it and so is in
it (perfect). On the other hand, for κινήσεις (telic actions) the present form
does not entail the perfect: “he is learning is not the same as he has learned,
nor does he is getting healthy mean he has gotten healthy … . For these are
not the same things: he is going and he has gone, he is building and he has
built, he is becoming and he has become, it is being moved and it has been
14 These are the verbs Campbell uses as examples of present statives in Basics, 64.
15 LSJ, 564. See Daniel W. Graham, “States and Performances: Aristotle’s Test,” The
Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1980): 117–30; Haug, “Semantics of the Greek Perfect,”
487–93.
moved; they are different” (Metaphysics 9.1048b, 24–33). With verbs such as
these (μανθάνω , ὑγιάζω, βαδίζω, οἰκοδομέω, γί [γ ] νο μαι, κινέω), the present
and the perfect denote distinct things: the present denotes a process that has
not reached its terminus, while the perfect denotes a condition that has come
about because the natural terminus of the process has been reached.
Neither Campbell nor I find complete support in Aristotle’s analysis of
ἐνέργειαι (i.e., lexically stative verbs), because Aristotle finds them to be essen-
tially the same in the present and perfect while we both want to say that they
are not exactly the same. We claim they are parallel in one important dimen-
sion (focusing on a present state in existence) but are different in another
respect: the perfect denotes heightened proximity as well (Campbell) or it
denotes also the action that led to the state (Fanning).
However, Aristotle’s assessment of κινήσεις (telic verbs) fits quite well
with analyzing the perfect as a quasi-perfective (Fanning) in view of how per-
fectives regularly combine with telic verbs, but they do not square at all with
an imperfective (Campbell) or a stative view (Porter).16 It is important to note
that these different entailments are connected directly to differences between
the present and perfect as tense forms, not to other features of the contexts
in which they are used (e.g., real-world implicatures, pragmatic inferences,
discourse functions). Since the lexical characteristics are the same and the
examples are cited apart from context, Aristotle perceives something inherent
in the semantic value of the present versus the perfect to be the difference.
And the difference is concerned with paying attention to the natural endpoint
implied in the telic action sense of the verb, making the perfect parallel in
this regard to the aorist/perfective aspect but not parallel to the present/
imperfective.17
The common element among these plausibility claims for Campbell’s
view of the perfect is that they make some sense when seen in isolation, but
when we take a broader view the plausibility fades. The next section will show
that a broader perspective is needed on other grounds as well.
16 See specific NT examples in my essay, pp. 64, 69, 74.

17 Aristotle’s opinion about the sense of the perfect disproves Campbell’s suggestion
(essay, p. 8) that the traditional view of the Greek perfect arose due to confusion
with Latin grammatical categories and is actually a “modern” conception. Geoffrey
Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), 102, 176, discusses a possible ancient influence of Latin on Greek
verb usage itself but this does not constitute later grammatical misunderstanding
of Greek.
2. Supposed Problems with the Other Approaches: Method

and Sense
In his major book on verbal aspect in the indicative, Campbell uses a “last
man standing” sequence in his chapter on the perfect: he surveys two other
approaches (which he regards as non-aspectual) and finds them wanting, then
discusses the other aspectual option (perfective) and finds that wanting, and
so concludes that the imperfective view is superior. All that remains is for him
to show how it satisfactorily accounts for all the uses of the perfect.18 This is
a shrewd argumentative tactic, but it does not provide a well-balanced inves-
tigation of the issues.
2.1 Questions of Linguistic Method: What Kind of Semantic
Description Is Needed?
One of the issues Campbell leaves virtually unexplored in his discussion of

the Greek perfect involves linguistic method.19 This begins with his insistence
that what is needed is a unitary, comprehensive description of the semantics of
the Greek perfect, but it branches out to other issues from there. In his survey
of other approaches he repeatedly finds fault with their failure to account for
the range of usage the ancient Greek perfect seems to display. One approach
satisfactorily explains one portion of the usage (e.g., stative senses) but fails
in another important area (e.g., transitive uses), and other approaches reverse
the pattern but likewise fail to give a comprehensive explanation.20 In the
course of his treatment he invokes several linguistic non-negotiables that
seem quite valid but actually require further examination and qualification.
Campbell calls again and again for an inductive examination of actual
usage unsullied by preconceptions or traditional constructs. The focus must
be on synchronic description before we tackle diachronic study. Assessing the
frequency of certain senses and their contexts is an essential part of inductive,
synchronic analysis. Patterns of translation, while a bit problematic, can give
important warnings about questionable approaches. Along the way we must
carefully sort out which features of meaning are due to the inherent uncan-
celable semantic value of the perfect itself and which nuances come from
18 See Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative, 193.
19 Campbell includes a significant and valuable discussion of methodological issues in
the introductory chapter of his book (ibid., 16–30), but the caveats and qualifications
stated there are almost completely absent from his treatment of the Greek perfect in
the later chapter and subsequent essays.
20 Ibid., 162–65, 169, 174, 193
pragmatic or contextual influences that may come and go. In formulating the
inherent semantic sense we must discover the unitary, invariant meaning that
can be traced in all the uses, the single core meaning of the perfect.21
I would not disagree in general terms with any of these principles.
Human language presents a welter of complexities, and guidelines like these
help to sort things out. But without going into extensive theoretical discus-
sion, I believe that some dimensions of these principles can be disputed and
they bring with them certain weaknesses that undermine our conclusions if
we are not careful. Inductive examination of texts, for example, can be noto-
riously idiosyncratic and subjective. All our claims to “follow the evidence
wherever it leads” cannot insulate us from our own preferences and blind
spots and can produce erratic, subjective results. Statistical analysis, especially
from raw computer searches, can be suspect since the numbers sometimes
mask important patterns a high-level search will miss, and statistics are still
crude data in need of interpretation. Attempts to find a core meaning that
explains all the usage can be elusive—what happens when inductive analysis
genuinely leads to diverse senses? Do we settle for an extremely abstract, and
thus unhelpful, formulation that finds some vague common element? Does
our method force us a priori to reject the inductive diversity we have found?
Or do we resort to strained efforts to make everything fit? What counts in the
end as a satisfactory explanation of the usage. 22
One set of insights that holds promise as a check on our inductive find-
ings comes from linguistic typology which brings with it a diachronic as well
as cross-linguistic perspective on language usage. To this we will now turn.
2.2 The Sense of the Ancient Greek Perfect: Diachronics and
Language Typology
Neither diachronic nor cross-linguistic analysis gives us automatic answers

for solving the problems of the Greek perfect. The fact that one stage of a
21 For examples, see ibid., 164, 175, 184, 188, 190, 210–11.
22 See reflection on these issues regarding tense usage in Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 78–84;
Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca, Evolution, 17; Smith, The Parameter of Aspect, 10–14;
Eva-Carin Gerö and Arnim von Stechow, “Tense in Time: The Greek Perfect,” in
Words in Time: Diachronic Semantics from Different Points of View (ed. Regine Eckardt,
Klaus von Heusinger, and Christoph Schwarze; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003),
267–69; John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense,
Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), x–xi,
172–91; Steven E. Runge, “Contrastive Substitution and the Greek Verb: Reassessing
Porter’s Argument,” NovT 56 (2014): 167; Crellin, “Greek Perfect through Gothic
Eyes,” 7–9; and the literature they cite.
language’s grammatical development exhibits a given meaning is no guaran-

tee that a different stage has the same sense. Nor can the presence of a seman-
tic feature or developmental pattern in various other languages be imposed
on a separate individual language without careful investigation of that lan-
guage itself. Diachronic and cross-linguistic comparison comes into play as a
check on inductive, synchronic analysis that has already been done, especially
when such analysis produces competing descriptions each of which can viably
claim to provide the best explanation. At that point it is valuable to ask which
explanation is most probable compared with how such categories work in
other human languages. Is one description anomalous, unparalleled in view of
what we know about how languages generally work?23 Probability judgments
are valuable in the face of a welter of rival explanations for complex systems.
The anomalous view could still be the best for a given individual language,
but we should look more carefully at its supporting evidence.24
Diachronic considerations likewise help broaden our perspective to guard
against drawing conclusions from a narrow slice of usage. Patterns of mean-
ing and change show up more clearly across time, and we may misread the
synchronic evidence if we are unaware of the larger trajectory. It is axiomatic
that languages and their grammatical categories evolve over time, sometimes
rapidly, sometimes quite slowly. In the process these stages of development
overlap: “grammatical categories span points along a continuous path, trailing
some past traits and pushing forward into new uses.”25 This is certainly true
of the ancient Greek perfect, and many scholars in different disciplines using
varied approaches have observed consistent features of diachronic change in
the Greek perfect.26 There is widespread agreement about the broad pattern
23 For tense-aspect systems we have a wealth of comparative data to work with, since these
categories are pervasive in languages of the world and they have been extensively stud-
ied in recent decades. Regarding the perfect see Östen Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 129–53; Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca, Evolution,
51–105; and Jouko Lindstedt, “The Perfect: Aspectual, Temporal and Inferential,”
in Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe (ed. Östen Dahl; Berlin: de Gruyter,
2000), 365–83.
24 Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca, Evolution, 1–4; Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew
Verb , x–xi, 178, 190.
25 Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca, Evolution, 302. See also their p. 4: “cross-linguistically
and within a given language, we can expect to find grammatical material at different
stages of development.”
26 Jacob Wackernagel, “Studien zum griechischen Perfectum [1904],” reprinted in
Kleine Schriften (2 vols.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1953), 1000–
24; Pierre Chantraine, Histoire du parfait grec (Paris: Champion, 1927), 1–3,
253–56; Schwyzer-Debrunner, Syntax, 263–64; Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 105–6;
Haug, “Semantics of the Greek Perfect,” 398–411; Jacob Wackernagel, Lectures on
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account—not a faked-up story, but an account extracted from the
annals of the police—of the organisation of one of these secret
societies, which mark down men against whom they bear a grudge,
and destroy them. And, when they do this, they disfigure their faces
with the mark of the Secret Society, and they cover up the track of
the assassin so completely—having money and resources at their
disposal—that nobody is ever able to get at them."
"I've read of such things, of course," admitted the stout man, "but I
thought as they mostly belonged to the medeevial days. They had a
thing like that in Italy once. What did they call it now? A Gomorrah,
was it? Are there any Gomorrahs nowadays?"
"You spoke a true word, sir, when you said Italy," replied the prim
man. "The Italian mind is made for intrigue. There's the Fascisti.
That's come to the surface now, of course, but it started by being a
secret society. And, if you were to look below the surface, you would
be amazed at the way in which that country is honeycombed with
hidden organisations of all sorts. Don't you agree with me, sir?" he
added, addressing the first-class passenger.
"Ah!" said the stout man, "no doubt this gentleman has been in Italy
and knows all about it. Should you say this murder was the work of a
Gomorrah, sir?"
"I hope not, I'm sure," said the first-class passenger. "I mean, it
rather destroys the interest, don't you think? I like a nice, quiet,
domestic murder myself, with the millionaire found dead in the
library. The minute I open a detective story and find a Camorra in it,
my interest seems to dry up and turn to dust and ashes—a sort of
Sodom and Camorra, as you might say."
"I agree with you there," said the young husband, "from what you
might call the artistic standpoint. But in this particular case I think
there may be something to be said for this gentleman's point of
view."
"Well," admitted the first-class passenger, "not having read the
details——"
"The details are clear enough," said the prim man. "This poor
creature was found lying dead on the beach at East Felpham early
this morning, with his face cut about in the most dreadful manner. He
had nothing on him but his bathing-dress——"
"Stop a minute. Who was he, to begin with?"
"They haven't identified him yet. His clothes had been taken——"
"That looks more like robbery, doesn't it?" suggested Kitty.
"If it was just robbery," retorted the prim man, "why should his face
have been cut up in that way? No—the clothes were taken away, as
I said, to prevent identification. That's what these societies always try
to do."
"Was he stabbed?" demanded the first-class passenger.
"No," said the stout man. "He wasn't. He was strangled."
"Not a characteristically Italian method of killing," observed the first-
class passenger.
"No more it is," said the stout man. The prim man seemed a little
disconcerted.
"And if he went down there to bathe," said the thin, elderly man,
"how did he get there? Surely somebody must have missed him
before now, if he was staying at Felpham. It's a busy spot for visitors
in the holiday season."
"No," said the stout man, "not East Felpham. You're thinking of West
Felpham, where the yacht-club is. East Felpham is one of the
loneliest spots on the coast. There's no house near except a little
pub all by itself at the end of a long road, and after that you have to
go through three fields to get to the sea. There's no real road, only a
cart-track, but you can take a car through. I've been there."
"He came in a car," said the prim man. "They found the track of the
wheels. But it had been driven away again."
"It looks as though the two men had come there together,"
suggested Kitty.
"I think they did," said the prim man. "The victim was probably
gagged and bound and taken along in the car to the place, and then
he was taken out and strangled and——"
"But why should they have troubled to put on his bathing-dress?"
said the first-class passenger.
"Because," said the prim man, "as I said, they didn't want to leave
any clothes to reveal his identity."
"Quite; but why not leave him naked? A bathing-dress seems to
indicate an almost excessive regard for decorum, under the
circumstances."
"Yes, yes," said the stout man impatiently, "but you 'aven't read the
paper carefully. The two men couldn't have come there in company,
and for why? There was only one set of footprints found, and they
belonged to the murdered man."
He looked round triumphantly.
"Only one set of footprints, eh?" said the first-class passenger
quickly. "This looks interesting. Are you sure?"
"It says so in the paper. A single set of footprints, it says, made by
bare feet, which by a careful comparison 'ave been shown to be
those of the murdered man, lead from the position occupied by the
car to the place where the body was found. What do you make of
that?"
"Why," said the first-class passenger, "that tells one quite a lot, don't
you know. It gives one a sort of a bird's eye view of the place, and it
tells one the time of the murder, besides castin' quite a good bit of
light on the character and circumstances of the murderer—or
murderers."
"How do you make that out, sir?" demanded the elderly man.
"Well, to begin with—though I've never been near the place, there is
obviously a sandy beach from which one can bathe."
"That's right," said the stout man.
"There is also, I fancy, in the neighbourhood, a spur of rock running
out into the sea, quite possibly with a handy diving-pool. It must run
out pretty far; at any rate, one can bathe there before it is high water
on the beach."
"I don't know how you know that, sir, but it's a fact. There's rocks and
a bathing-pool, exactly as you describe, about a hundred yards
farther along. Many's the time I've had a dip off the end of them."
"And the rocks run right back inland, where they are covered with
short grass."
"That's right."
"The murder took place shortly before high tide, I fancy, and the body
lay just about at high-tide mark."
"Why so?"
"Well, you say there were footsteps leading right up to the body. That
means that the water hadn't been up beyond the body. But there
were no other marks. Therefore the murderer's footprints must have
been washed away by the tide. The only explanation is that the two
men were standing together just below the tide-mark. The murderer
came up out of the sea. He attacked the other man—maybe he
forced him back a little on his own tracks—and there he killed him.
Then the water came up and washed out any marks the murderer
may have left. One can imagine him squatting there, wondering if the
sea was going to come up high enough."
"Ow!" said Kitty, "you make me creep all over."
"Now, as to these marks on the face," pursued the first-class
passenger. "The murderer, according to the idea I get of the thing,
was already in the sea when the victim came along. You see the
idea?"
"I get you," said the stout man. "You think as he went in off them
rocks what we was speaking of, and came up through the water, and
that's why there weren't no footprints."
"Exactly. And since the water is deep round those rocks, as you say,
he was presumably in a bathing-dress too."
"Looks like it."
"Quite so. Well, now—what was the face-slashing done with? People
don't usually take knives out with them when they go for a morning
dip."
"That's a puzzle," said the stout man.
"Not altogether. Let's say, either the murderer had a knife with him or
he had not. If he had——"
"If he had," put in the prim man eagerly, "he must have laid wait for
the deceased on purpose. And, to my mind, that bears out my idea
of a deep and cunning plot."
"Yes. But, if he was waiting there with the knife, why didn't he stab
the man and have done with it? Why strangle him, when he had a
perfectly good weapon there to hand? No—I think he came
unprovided, and, when he saw his enemy there, he made for him
with his hands in the characteristic British way."
"But the slashing?"
"Well, I think that when he had got his man down, dead before him,
he was filled with a pretty grim sort of fury and wanted to do more
damage. He caught up something that was lying near him on the
sand—it might be a bit of old iron, or even one of those sharp shells
you sometimes see about, or a bit of glass—and he went for him
with that in a desperate rage of jealousy or hatred."
"Dreadful, dreadful!" said the elderly woman.
"Of course, one can only guess in the dark, not having seen the
wounds. It's quite possible that the murderer dropped his knife in the
struggle and had to do the actual killing with his hands, picking the
knife up afterwards. If the wounds were clean knife-wounds, that is
probably what happened, and the murder was premeditated. But if
they were rough, jagged gashes, made by an impromptu weapon,
then I should say it was a chance encounter, and that the murderer
was either mad or——"
"Or?"
"Or had suddenly come upon somebody whom he hated very much."
"What do you think happened afterwards?"
"That's pretty clear. The murderer, having waited, as I said, to see
that all his footprints were cleaned up by the tide, waded or swam
back to the rock where he had left his clothes, taking the weapon
with him. The sea would wash away any blood from his bathing-
dress or body. He then climbed out upon the rocks, walked, with
bare feet, so as to leave no tracks on any seaweed or anything, to
the short grass of the shore, dressed, went along to the murdered
man's car, and drove it away."
"Why did he do that?"
"Yes, why? He may have wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. Or he
may have been afraid that if the murdered man were identified too
soon it would cast suspicion on him. Or it may have been a mixture
of motives. The point is, where did he come from? How did he come
to be bathing at that remote spot, early in the morning? He didn't get
there by car, or there would be a second car to be accounted for. He
may have been camping near the spot; but it would have taken him a
long time to strike camp and pack all his belongings into the car, and
he might have been seen. I am rather inclined to think he had
bicycled there, and that he hoisted the bicycle into the back of the
car and took it away with him."
"But, in that case, why take the car?"
"Because he had been down at East Felpham longer than he
expected, and he was afraid of being late. Either he had to get back
to breakfast at some house, where his absence would be noticed, or
else he lived some distance off, and had only just time enough for
the journey home. I think, though, he had to be back to breakfast."
"Why?"
"Because, if it was merely a question of making up time on the road,
all he had to do was to put himself and his bicycle on the train for
part of the way. No; I fancy he was staying in a smallish hotel
somewhere. Not a large hotel, because there nobody would notice
whether he came in or not. And not, I think, in lodgings, or somebody
would have mentioned before now that they had had a lodger who
went bathing at East Felpham. Either he lives in the neighbourhood,
in which case he should be easy to trace, or was staying with friends
who have an interest in concealing his movements. Or else—which I
think is more likely—he was in a smallish hotel, where he would be
missed from the breakfast-table, but where his favourite bathing-
place was not matter of common knowledge."
"That seems feasible," said the stout man.
"In any case," went on the first-class passenger, "he must have been
staying within easy bicycling distance of East Felpham, so it
shouldn't be too hard to trace him. And then there is the car."
"Yes. Where is the car, on your theory?" demanded the prim man,
who obviously still had hankerings after the Camorra theory.
"In a garage, waiting to be called for," said the first-class passenger
promptly.
"Where?" persisted the prim man.
"Oh! somewhere on the other side of wherever it was the murderer
was staying. If you have a particular reason for not wanting it to be
known that you were in a certain place at a specified time, it's not a
bad idea to come back from the opposite direction. I rather think I
should look for the car at West Felpham, and the hotel in the nearest
town on the main road beyond where the two roads to East and
West Felpham join. When you've found the car, you've found the
name of the victim, naturally. As for the murderer, you will have to
look for an active man, a good swimmer and ardent bicyclist—
probably not very well off, since he cannot afford to have a car—who
has been taking a holiday in the neighbourhood of the Felphams,
and who has a good reason for disliking the victim, whoever he may
be."
"Well, I never," said the elderly woman admiringly. "How beautiful
you do put it all together. Like Sherlock Holmes, I do declare."
"It's a very pretty theory," said the prim man, "but, all the same, you'll
find it's a secret society. Mark my words. Dear me! We're just running
in. Only twenty minutes late. I call that very good for holiday-time.
Will you excuse me? My bag is just under your feet."
There was an eighth person in the compartment, who had remained
throughout the conversation apparently buried in a newspaper. As
the passengers decanted themselves upon the platform, this man
touched the first-class passenger upon the arm.
"Excuse me, sir," he said. "That was a very interesting suggestion of
yours. My name is Winterbottom, and I am investigating this case.
Do you mind giving me your name? I might wish to communicate
with you later on."
"Certainly," said the first-class passenger. "Always delighted to have
a finger in any pie, don't you know. Here is my card. Look me up any
time you like."
Detective-Inspector Winterbottom took the card and read the name:
Lord Peter Wimsey,
110A Piccadilly.
The Evening Views vendor outside Piccadilly Tube Station arranged

his placard with some care. It looked very well, he thought.
MAN WITH
NO FACE
IDENTIFIED
It was, in his opinion, considerably more striking than that displayed
by a rival organ, which announced, unimaginatively:
BEACH MURDER
VICTIM
IDENTIFIED
A youngish gentleman in a grey suit who emerged at that moment
from the Criterion Bar appeared to think so too, for he exchanged a
copper for the Evening Views, and at once plunged into its perusal
with such concentrated interest that he bumped into a hurried man
outside the station and had to apologise.
The Evening Views, grateful to murderer and victim alike for
providing so useful a sensation in the dead days after the Bank
Holiday, had torn Messrs. Negretti & Zambra's rocketing
thermometrical statistics from the "banner" position which they had
occupied in the lunch edition, and substituted:
"Faceless Victim of Beach Outrage Identified

MURDER OF PROMINENT
PUBLICITY ARTIST
POLICE CLUES
"The body of a middle-aged man who was discovered,

attired only in a bathing-costume and with his face
horribly disfigured by some jagged instrument, on the
beach at East Felpham last Monday morning, has
been identified as that of Mr. Coreggio Plant, studio
manager of Messrs. Crichton Ltd., the well-known
publicity experts of Holborn.
"Mr. Plant, who was forty-five years of age and a
bachelor, was spending his annual holiday in making a
motoring tour along the West Coast. He had no
companion with him and had left no address for the
forwarding of letters, so that, without the smart work of
Detective-Inspector Winterbottom of the Westshire
police, his disappearance might not in the ordinary way
have been noticed until he became due to return to his
place of business in three weeks' time. The murderer
had no doubt counted on this, and had removed the
motor-car, containing the belongings of his victim, in
the hope of covering up all traces of this dastardly
outrage so as to gain time for escape.
"A rigorous search for the missing car, however,
eventuated in its discovery in a garage at West
Felpham, where it had been left for decarbonisation
and repairs to the magneto. Mr. Spiller, the garage
proprietor, himself saw the man who left the car, and
has furnished a description of him to the police. He is
said to be a small, dark man of foreign appearance.
The police hold a clue to his identity, and an arrest is
confidently expected in the near future.
"Mr. Plant was for fifteen years in the employment of
Messrs. Crichton, being appointed Studio Manager in
the latter years of the war. He was greatly liked by all
his colleagues, and his skill in the lay-out and
designing of advertisements did much to justify the
truth of Messrs. Crichton's well-known slogan:
'Crichton's for Admirable Advertising.'
"The funeral of the victim will take place to-morrow at
Golders Green Cemetery.
"(Pictures on Back Page.)"
Lord Peter Wimsey turned to the back page. The portrait of the
victim did not detain him long; it was one of those characterless
studio photographs which establish nothing except that the sitter has
a tolerable set of features. He noted that Mr. Plant had been thin
rather than fat, commercial in appearance rather than artistic, and
that the photographer had chosen to show him serious rather than
smiling. A picture of East Felpham beach, marked with a cross
where the body was found, seemed to arouse in him rather more
than a casual interest. He studied it intently for some time, making
little surprised noises. There was no obvious reason why he should
have been surprised, for the photograph bore out in every detail the
deductions he had made in the train. There was the curved line of
sand, with a long spur of rock stretching out behind it into deep
water, and running back till it mingled with the short, dry turf.
Nevertheless, he looked at it for several minutes with close attention,
before folding the newspaper and hailing a taxi; and when he was in
the taxi he unfolded the paper and looked at it again.
"Your lordship having been kind enough," said Inspector

Winterbottom, emptying his glass rather too rapidly for true
connoisseurship, "to suggest I should look you up in Town, I made
bold to give you a call in passing. Thank you, I won't say no. Well, as
you've seen in the papers by now, we found that car all right."
Wimsey expressed his gratification at this result.
"And very much obliged I was to your lordship for the hint," went on
the Inspector generously, "not but what I wouldn't say but I should
have come to the same conclusion myself, given a little more time.
And, what's more, we're on the track of the man."
"I see he's supposed to be foreign-looking. Don't say he's going to
turn out to be a Camorrist after all!"
"No, my lord." The Inspector winked. "Our friend in the corner had
got his magazine stories a bit on the brain, if you ask me. And you
were a bit out too, my lord, with your bicyclist idea."
"Was I? That's a blow."
"Well, my lord, these here theories sound all right, but half the time
they're too fine-spun altogether. Go for the facts—that's our motto in
the Force—facts and motive, and you won't go far wrong."
"Oh! you've discovered the motive, then?"
The Inspector winked again.
"There's not many motives for doing a man in," said he. "Women or
money—or women and money—it mostly comes down to one or the
other. This fellow Plant went in for being a bit of a lad, you see. He
kept a little cottage down Felpham way, with a nice little skirt to
furnish it and keep the love-nest warm for him—see?"
"Oh! I thought he was doing a motor-tour."
"Motor-tour your foot!" said the Inspector, with more energy than
politeness. "That's what the old [epithet] told 'em at the office. Handy
reason, don't you see, for leaving no address behind him. No, no.
There was a lady in it all right. I've seen her. A very taking piece too,
if you like 'em skinny, which I don't. I prefer 'em better upholstered
myself."
"That chair is really more comfortable with a cushion," put in Wimsey,
with anxious solicitude. "Allow me."
"Thanks, my lord, thanks. I'm doing very well. It seems that this
woman—by the way, we're speaking in confidence, you understand.
I don't want this to go further till I've got my man under lock and key."
Wimsey promised discretion.
"That's all right, my lord, that's all right. I know I can rely on you.
Well, the long and the short is, this young woman had another fancy
man—a sort of an Italiano, whom she'd chucked for Plant, and this
same dago got wind of the business and came down to East
Felpham on the Sunday night, looking for her. He's one of these
professional partners in a Palais de Danse up Cricklewood way, and
that's where the girl comes from, too. I suppose she thought Plant
was a cut above him. Anyway, down he comes, and busts in upon
them Sunday night when they were having a bit of supper—and
that's when the row started."
"Didn't you know about this cottage and the goings-on there?"
"Well, you know, there's such a lot of these week-enders nowadays.
We can't keep tabs on all of them, so long as they behave
themselves and don't make a disturbance. The woman's been there
—so they tell me—since last June, with him coming down Saturday
to Monday; but it's a lonely spot, and the constable didn't take much
notice. He came in the evenings, so there wasn't anybody much to
recognise him, except the old girl who did the slops and things, and
she's half-blind. And of course, when they found him, he hadn't any
face to recognise. It'd be thought he'd just gone off in the ordinary
way. I dare say the dago fellow reckoned on that. As I was saying,
there was a big row, and the dago was kicked out. He must have lain
wait for Plant down by the bathing-place, and done him in."
"By strangling?"
"Well, he was strangled."
"Was his face cut up with a knife, then?"
"Well, no—I don't think it was a knife. More like a broken bottle, I
should say, if you ask me. There's plenty of them come in with the
tide."
"But then we're brought back to our old problem. If this Italian was
lying in wait to murder Plant, why didn't he take a weapon with him,
instead of trusting to the chance of his hands and a broken bottle?"
The Inspector shook his head.
"Flighty," he said. "All these foreigners are flighty. No headpiece. But
there's our man and there's our motive, plain as a pikestaff. You don't
want more."
"And where is the Italian fellow now?"
"Run away. That's pretty good proof of guilt in itself. But we'll have
him before long. That's what I've come to Town about. He can't get
out of the country. I've had an all-stations call sent out to stop him.
The dance-hall people were able to supply us with a photo and a
good description. I'm expecting a report in now any minute. In fact,
I'd best be getting along. Thank you very much for your hospitality,
my lord."
"The pleasure is mine," said Wimsey, ringing the bell to have the
visitor shown out. "I have enjoyed our little chat immensely."
Sauntering into the Falstaff at twelve o'clock the following morning,

Wimsey, as he had expected, found Salcombe Hardy supporting his
rather plump contours against the bar. The reporter greeted his
arrival with a heartiness amounting almost to enthusiasm, and called
for two large Scotches immediately. When the usual skirmish as to
who should pay had been honourably settled by the prompt disposal
of the drinks and the standing of two more, Wimsey pulled from his
pocket the copy of last night's Evening Views.
"I wish you'd ask the people over at your place to get hold of a
decent print of this for me," he said, indicating the picture of East
Felpham beach.
Salcome Hardy gazed limpid enquiry at him from eyes like drowned
violets.
"See here, you old sleuth," he said, "does this mean you've got a
theory about the thing? I'm wanting a story badly. Must keep up the
excitement, you know. The police don't seem to have got any further
since last night."
"No; I'm interested in this from another point of view altogether. I did
have a theory—of sorts—but it seems it's all wrong. Bally old Homer
nodding, I suppose. But I'd like a copy of the thing."
"I'll get Warren to get you one when we come back. I'm just taking
him down with me to Crichton's. We're going to have a look at a
picture. I say, I wish you'd come too. Tell me what to say about the
damned thing."
"Good God! I don't know anything about commercial art."
"'Tisn't commercial art. It's supposed to be a portrait of this blighter
Plant. Done by one of the chaps in his studio or something. Kid who
told me about it says it's clever. I don't know. Don't suppose she
knows, either. You go in for being artistic, don't you?"
"I wish you wouldn't use such filthy expressions, Sally. Artistic! Who
is this girl?"
"Typist in the copy department."
"Oh, Sally!"
"Nothing of that sort. I've never met her. Name's Gladys Twitterton.
I'm sure that's beastly enough to put anybody off. Rang us up last
night and told us there was a bloke there who'd done old Plant in oils
and was it any use to us? Drummer thought it might be worth looking
into. Make a change from that everlasting syndicated photograph."
"I see. If you haven't got an exclusive story, an exclusive picture's
better than nothing. The girl seems to have her wits about her.
Friend of the artist's?"
"No—said he'd probably be frightfully annoyed at her having told me.
But I can wangle that. Only I wish you'd come and have a look at it.
Tell me whether I ought to say it's an unknown masterpiece or
merely a striking likeness."
"How the devil can I say if it's a striking likeness of a bloke I've never
seen?"
"I'll say it's that, in any case. But I want to know if it's well painted."
"Curse it, Sally, what's it matter whether it is or not? I've got other
things to do. Who's the artist, by the way? Anybody one's ever heard
of?"
"Dunno. I've got the name here somewhere." Sally rooted in his hip-
pocket and produced a mass of dirty correspondence, its angles
blunted by constant attrition. "Some comic name like Buggle or
Snagtooth—wait a bit—here it is. Crowder. Thomas Crowder. I knew
it was something out of the way."
"Singularly like Buggle or Snagtooth. All right, Sally, I'll make a
martyr of myself. Lead me to it."
"We'll have another quick one. Here's Warren. This is Lord Peter
Wimsey. This is on me."
"On me," corrected the photographer, a jaded young man with a
disillusioned manner. "Three large White Labels, please. Well, here's
all the best. Are you fit, Sally? Because we'd better make tracks. I've
got to be up at Golders Green by two for the funeral."
Mr. Crowder of Crichton's appeared to have had the news broken to
him already by Miss Twitterton, for he received the embassy in a
spirit of gloomy acquiescence.
"The directors won't like it," he said, "but they've had to put up with
such a lot that I suppose one irregularity more or less won't give 'em
apoplexy." He had a small, anxious, yellow face like a monkey.
Wimsey put him down as being in his late thirties. He noticed his
fine, capable hands, one of which was disfigured by a strip of
sticking-plaster.
"Damaged yourself?" said Wimsey pleasantly, as they made their
way upstairs to the studio. "Mustn't make a practice of that, what? An
artist's hands are his livelihood—except, of course, for Armless
Wonders and people of that kind! Awkward job, painting with your
toes."
"Oh, it's nothing much," said Crowder, "but it's best to keep the paint
out of surface scratches. There's such a thing as lead-poisoning.
Well, here's this dud portrait, such as it is. I don't mind telling you
that it didn't please the sitter. In fact, he wouldn't have it at any price."
"Not flattering enough?" asked Hardy.
"As you say." The painter pulled out a four by three canvas from its
hiding-place behind a stack of poster cartoons, and heaved it up on
to the easel.
"Oh!" said Hardy, a little surprised. Not that there was any reason for
surprise as far as the painting itself was concerned. It was a straight-
forward handling enough; the skill and originality of the brush-work
being of the kind that interests the painter without shocking the
ignorant.
"Oh!" said Hardy. "Was he really like that?"
He moved closer to the canvas, peering into it as he might have
peered into the face of the living man, hoping to get something out of
him. Under this microscopic scrutiny, the portrait, as is the way of
portraits, dislimned, and became no more than a conglomeration of
painted spots and streaks. He made the discovery that, to the
painter's eye, the human face is full of green and purple patches.
He moved back again, and altered the form of his question:
"So that's what he was like, was he?"
He pulled out the photograph of Plant from his pocket, and
compared it with the portrait. The portrait seemed to sneer at his
surprise.
"Of course, they touch these things up at these fashionable
photographers," he said. "Anyway, that's not my business. This thing
will make a jolly good eye-catcher, don't you think so, Wimsey?
Wonder if they'd give us a two-column spread on the front page?
Well, Warren, you'd better get down to it."
The photographer, bleakly unmoved by artistic or journalistic
considerations, took silent charge of the canvas, mentally resolving it
into a question of pan-chromatic plates and coloured screens.
Crowder gave him a hand in shifting the easel into a better light. Two
or three people from other departments, passing through the studio
on their lawful occasions, stopped, and lingered in the
neighbourhood of the disturbance, as though it were a street
accident. A melancholy, grey-haired man, temporary head of the
studio, vice Coreggio Plant, deceased, took Crowder aside, with a
muttered apology, to give him some instructions about adapting a
whole quad to an eleven-inch treble. Hardy turned to Lord Peter.
"It's damned ugly," he said. "Is it good?"
"Brilliant," said Wimsey. "You can go all out. Say what you like about
it."
"Oh, splendid! Could we discover one of our neglected British
masters?"
"Yes; why not? You'll probably make the man the fashion and ruin
him as an artist, but that's his pigeon."
"But, I say—do you think it's a good likeness? He's made him look a
most sinister sort of fellow. After all, Plant thought it was so bad he
wouldn't have it."
"The more fool he. Ever heard of the portrait of a certain statesman
that was so revealing of his inner emptiness that he hurriedly bought
it up and hid it to prevent people like you from getting hold of it?"
Crowder came back.
"I say," said Wimsey, "whom does that picture belong to? You? Or
the heirs of the deceased, or what?"
"I suppose it's back on my hands," said the painter. "Plant—well, he
more or less commissioned it, you see, but——"
"How more or less?"
"Well, he kept on hinting, don't you know, that he would like me to do
him, and, as he was my boss, I thought I'd better. No price actually
mentioned. When he saw it, he didn't like it, and told me to alter it."
"But you didn't."
"Oh—well, I put it aside and said I'd see what I could do with it. I
thought he'd perhaps forget about it."
"I see. Then presumably it's yours to dispose of."
"I should think so. Why?"
"You have a very individual technique, haven't you?" pursued
Wimsey. "Do you exhibit much?"
"Here and there. I've never had a show in London."
"I fancy I once saw a couple of small sea-scapes of yours
somewhere. Manchester, was it? or Liverpool? I wasn't sure of your
name, but I recognised the technique immediately."
"I dare say. I did send a few things to Manchester about two years
ago."
"Yes—I felt sure I couldn't be mistaken. I want to buy the portrait.
Here's my card, by the way. I'm not a journalist; I collect things."
Crowder looked from the card to Wimsey and from Wimsey to the
card, a little reluctantly.
"If you want to exhibit it, of course," said Lord Peter, "I should be
delighted to leave it with you as long as you liked."
"Oh, it's not that," said Crowder. "The fact is, I'm not altogether keen
on the thing. I should like to—that is to say, it's not really finished."
"My dear man, it's a bally masterpiece."
"Oh, the painting's all right. But it's not altogether satisfactory as a
likeness."
"What the devil does the likeness matter? I don't know what the late
Plant looked like and I don't care. As I look at the thing it's a damn
fine bit of brush-work, and if you tinker about with it you'll spoil it. You
know that as well as I do. What's biting you? It isn't the price, is it?
You know I shan't boggle about that. I can afford my modest
pleasures, even in these thin and piping times. You don't want me to
have it? Come now—what's the real reason?"
"There's no reason at all why you shouldn't have it if you really want
it, I suppose," said the painter, still a little sullenly. "If it's really the
painting that interests you."
"What do you suppose it is? The notoriety? I can have all I want of
that commodity, you know, for the asking—or even without asking.
Well, anyhow, think it over, and when you've decided, send me a line
and name your price."
Crowder nodded without speaking, and the photographer having by
this time finished his job, the party took their leave.
As they left the building, they became involved in the stream of
Crichton's staff going out to lunch. A girl, who seemed to have been
loitering in a semi-intentional way in the lower hall, caught them as
the lift descended.
"Are you the Evening Views people? Did you get your picture all
right?"
"Miss Twitterton?" said Hardy interrogatively. "Yes, rather—thank you
so much for giving us the tip. You'll see it on the front page this
evening."
"Oh! that's splendid! I'm frightfully thrilled. It has made an excitement
here—all this business. Do they know anything yet about who
murdered Mr. Plant? Or am I being horribly indiscreet?"
"We're expecting news of an arrest any minute now," said Hardy. "As
a matter of fact, I shall have to buzz back to the office as fast as I
can, to sit with one ear glued to the telephone. You will excuse me,
won't you? And, look here—will you let me come round another day,
when things aren't so busy, and take you out to lunch?"
"Of course. I should love to." Miss Twitterton giggled. "I do so want to
hear about all the murder cases."
"Then here's the man to tell you about them, Miss Twitterton," said
Hardy, with mischief in his eye. "Allow me to introduce Lord Peter
Wimsey."
Miss Twitterton offered her hand in an ecstasy of excitement which
almost robbed her of speech.
"How do you do?" said Wimsey. "As this blighter is in such a hurry to
get back to his gossip-shop, what do you say to having a spot of
lunch with me?"
"Well, really——" began Miss Twitterton.
"He's all right," said Hardy; "he won't lure you into any gilded dens of
infamy. If you look at him, you will see he has a kind, innocent face."
"I'm sure I never thought of such a thing," said Miss Twitterton. "But
you know—really—I've only got my old things on. It's no good
wearing anything decent in this dusty old place."
"Oh, nonsense!" said Wimsey. "You couldn't possibly look nicer. It
isn't the frock that matters—it's the person who wears it. That's all
right, then. See you later, Sally! Taxi! Where shall we go? What time
do you have to be back, by the way?"
"Two o'clock," said Miss Twitterton regretfully.
"Then we'll make the Savoy do," said Wimsey; "it's reasonably
handy."
Miss Twitterton hopped into the waiting taxi with a little squeak of
agitation.
"Did you see Mr. Crichton?" she said. "He went by just as we were
talking. However, I dare say he doesn't really know me by sight. I
hope not—or he'll think I'm getting too grand to need a salary." She
rooted in her hand-bag. "I'm sure my face is getting all shiny with

The Perfect Storm: Critical Discussion of The Semantics of The Greek Perfect Tense Under Aspect Theory (Studies in Biblical Greek) Campbell

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The Perfect Storm: Critical Discussion

of the Semantics of the Greek Perfect

The Greek Perfect Tense in the Gospel of Mark and the

Perfect Storm (Perfect Storm #1) 1st Edition Bobby

The Greek Perfekt Tense in the Gospel of Marc and the

Under The Greek s Protection 1st Edition Sonja B

Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar 4th Edition William D.

Governments' Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic in

The Classical Debt Greek Antiquity in an Era of

The Logical Syntax of Greek Mathematics 1st Edition

Studies in Biblical Greek

Edited and with an

Nowhere are the chaotic debates surrounding contemporary aspect theory

Constantine R. Campbell is Senior Vice-President for Global Content and Bible

Buist M. Fanning is Senior Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at

D. A. Carson is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical

The Perfect Storm

Studies in Biblical Greek

The Perfect Storm

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

© 2021 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

Soli Deo gloria.

Series Editor’s Preface ix

2. The Greek Perfect: Why It Isn’t 5

3. Response to Campbell’s Imperfective View of the Greek Perfect 25

4. Why the Greek Perfect Tense-Form Is Stative: A Response to Constantine

5. Deﬁning the Ancient Greek Perfect: Interacting with Recent

Alternatives to the Traditional View of the Perfect 61

7. Deﬁning the Greek Perfect Tense-Form as Stative: A Response to Buist

Tense-Form in the Greek Verbal System 105

9. Response to Porter 129

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

10. Response to Porter’s Stative View of the Greek Perfect 143

Series Editor’s Preface

Studies in Biblical Greek is an occasional series of monographs designed to

1. An Introduction to the Debate

In November 2010, Constantine R. Campbell, Buist M. Fanning, and Stanley

with Porter; Kenneth L. McKay, a classicist by training, developed aspect

ticipants in this volume. In some ways, the most comprehensive treatment of

Reference to Aspect in the Verb (Canberra: Australian National University, 1974).

Rapids: Baker, 2015), 159–74.

Aspects in New Testament Greek,” Novum Testamentum 23 (1981): 289–329.

An Introduction to the Debate 3

author’s choice of how to present an event or kind of action). What is usually

a homogeneous atelic eventuality from the predicate and includes [Topic

13 Crellin, “Semantics of the Perfect,” 454.

2. The Greek Perfect: Why It Isn’t

2. The Greek Perfect Isn’t

Biblical Studies 7; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 41–45.

suffer from signiﬁcant theoretical weaknesses. We turn ﬁrst to consider the

2.1 Against the Traditional View

2 Buist M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford Theological

Lang, 2007), 162.

The Greek Perfect 7

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics has become standard in

6 Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 112, n. 74.

Finally, while it has yet to be proved, the traditional understanding of the

2.2 Against Stative Aspect

Porter’s stative aspect understanding of the Greek perfect is developed from

9 Bernard A. Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” in Biblical Greek Language

A. Taylor, John A. L. Lee, Peter R. Burton, and Richard E. E. Whitaker; Grand

Semantiese Waarde van die Perfektum in Hellenistiese Grieks,” Acta Classica 10