Tense, Aspect, and Aktionsart

Functional morphemes related to verbs

When we introduced functional morphemes in Morphology A:, we said that they help to situate the things that lexemes refer to in the world. Determiners and quantifiers do so by specifying the number of entities and how they relate to the knowledge of the speaker and addressee (see Semantics B:). Tense and aspect situate eventualities temporally in the world. Modality and mood situate eventualities in the real world or in hypothetical worlds (see Semantics D).

There is probably no topic that has caused a greater amount of confusion for both scholars and students than tense and aspect. While lack of space precludes a full discussion of all the views within NT scholarship on these semantic categories, it must be clearly said at the outset that tense and aspect are both temporal categories. More specifically, aspect is not spatial, and labelling it “perspectival” is also very misleading. There is no debate about this within linguistics, and I would refer any interested to Biblingo’s blog and YouTube channel where I have a sustained discussion of the problems with this view and its relationship to the wider world of linguistics. The second important thing for the student to remember is that Greek is not particularly special when it comes to aspect. Although tense is often viewed as a basic, easy-to-understand concept, aspect is often viewed as an ethereal category that Greek expresses in a special way. Statements like the following from Mathewson and Ballantine Emig (2016:113) are commonplace:

Though there is still some disagreement on the issue of whether Greek indicative verb tenses indicate time, our grammar will side with advocates of verbal aspect in the treatment of the Greek tense system. But one must at least agree with Robertson (824–25) that time is but a subordinate element in Greek verb tenses.

By way of contrast, the English tense system primarily indicates time (past, present, future). However, in a more limited way even English can indicate aspect. What is the difference between these two statements?

I studied Greek last night.

I was studying Greek last night.

Both refer to the same event, the act of studying Greek, and the same time, last night. The difference is one of aspect, how the speaker chooses to portray the action: as a simple whole (“studied”) or as in progress (“was studying”).

The suggestion by Mathewson and Ballantine Emig is that English expresses aspect “in a more limited way,” but the Greek verbal system, on the other hand, “primarily” indicates aspect. This, however, is a failure to recognize the complexity of English’s system, and at a deeper level, it reflects a misunderstanding of what aspect is. In fact, I know of no other language that can make as many aspectual distinctions as English. Not only can we say I studied Greek last night, but we can say I had studied Greek last night as well as I had been studying Greek last night (all of which are past tense and are distinguished based on aspect), and we can even make the same aspectual distinction in the future (which is much rarer in the world’s languages) with I will have been studying Greek tomorrow night. In contrast, the Greek system would allow for a similar three-way contrast between I studied/was studying/had studied, but it would not readily allow for I had been studying, and that three-way distinction is only found in the past tense in Greek. English has a four-way contrast in the past, present, and future. Suffice it to say, English’s aspectual system is tremendously complex. Although Greek has its own nuances and idiosyncrasies (like any other language), it is not particularly unique in the amount of aspects encoded in the verbal system.

With these caveats in mind, I present here the standard analyses of tense, aspect, and aktionsart in linguistics and apply them briefly to the verbal forms in NT Greek. This section is designed to help you understand the linguistic categories better. Summaries of each of the forms can be found in various sections: Luo/present (49.2.3.2), Luso/future (52.1.3.2), Aorist (44.1.3.2), imperfect/Eluon (45.1.3.2), and Leluka/perfect (later this section; see also 51.3.3.2).

At the outset, we must note that the notional categories we introduce may map onto a particular language’s verbal forms only partially. For example, we might define the notional category of present tense as an overlap between the time when the utterance is made and when the eventuality takes place. This would require that each time the present tense is used in spoken or written text, the eventuality would hold at the time concurrent with the speaker. If we defined the present tense in this way, it does not tell us whether the Greek morpheme that we normally associate with present tense (the Luo form) refers to the same notional category. It may refer to a concept that is similar but not identical to the way we have defined the present tense. This is what I mean when I say that the notional category we introduce may only partially map onto Greek’s verbal forms. Given that the notional categories in linguistics have been developed based on how the languages of the world operate, it is probably the case that some category has already been developed that fits the morphemes in Greek, but we may have to tweak our notional category based on the data we find in NT Greek.

Tense

The term tense is used in a variety of ways. It is sometimes used to refer to a verb form, such as in the phrases present/imperfect/future tense forms. I do not use the term like this, and whenever I want to refer to a form, I will either use the term “verb form” or will refer to the form itself by its morphological shape (see 15.1.3 for details on this naming convention and justification for it). In semantics, the term “tense” refers to the location of an eventuality in time (see 5.1.3.2 for the introduction to this term). Because tense is how the speaker situates the eventuality in time, the prototypical case is when the time of the eventuality is related to the time of speaking. For example, if I say Laura ate pizza and watched “The Lord of the Rings” last night, the typical way to understand this is that the eventualities of Laura eating pizza and watching the greatest movie of all time occurred prior to when I made the utterance. In fact, we can be more specific about the time of these events – they did not just occur prior to when the utterance was made, but they happened at a specific time prior to the utterance, namely last night. Even if we were to take out last night, we still understand that the events of Laura eating pizza and watching LOTR happened at a specific time in the past. Context would usually make clear when this event occurred. Thus, when we use a past tense verb form (like ate or watched), we are making a claim about what occurred at a particular time.

In discussing our sample sentence, we introduced distinct time periods or intervals. First, there was a time of speaking, or the time when the utterance was made. This is called the Temporal Anchor (TA) because it provides the anchor to which other times are related. In 5.1.3.2, we labelled this same point the Utterance Time (UT), but because the anchor is often, but not always, the time of speaking, we update our terminology here. Second, we said that there was a time when the eventuality took place. Again in accordance with the terms introduced in 5.1.3.2, this is called the Event(uality) Time (ET). It is when the eventuality took place (or will take place) in the real world. The astute reader will have also noticed that we discussed a third time interval. This is the time in which we are making a claim about the world, which we called the Reference Time (RT). Tense, aspect, and aktionsart are all concerned with relationships between, or properties of, these three time intervals.

In our description of the past tense, we said that the speaker makes a claim about the world at a certain time. Given this description, we can see that tense is not a relationship between the TA and when the event takes place (the ET), but by the speaker to present the story more “vividly.” Given that this is a phenomenon found in a variety of languages and that it is the standard analysis in the semantics literature, we need not belabor this point.

In other cases, the present tense is used, but a shifting TA does not seem to be the best explanation. This is particularly true of examples where the event referred to by the verb is in the future, even though the present tense is used. These have been called “futurates” (Copley 2008):

(314) Futurate use of Luo

ἰδοὺ τὰ ἡμίσιά μου τῶν ὑπαρχόντων, κύριε, τοῖς πτωχοῖς δίδωμι (Luke 19:8)

Behold, half of my possessions, lord, I am giving to the poor

In this example, Zacchaeus is not in the midst of giving anything to the poor. He is in the midst of talking to Jesus. However, the present tense is used (and it can be used in English as well in the same scenario). The reason the present tense can be used is because Zacchaeus has already decided that he is giving half of his possessions to the poor, and deciding to perform the event is its first stage. Thus, the present tense can be used for events that have already been decided or scheduled to occur in the future. The TA does not shift in examples like these (like it does on the historical present), but the RT includes a pre-stage of the ET, which does indeed overlap with the speaker’s present. The futurate use of the present portrays the event as already having begun because it has already begun insofar as the decision to engage in a volitional action is itself part of the action.

It may be asked, what makes the kinds of analyses we have given for the historical present better than simply saying that the present tense is not a tense at all? There are two main reasons for this. First, these uses are also found in English (and many other languages), suggesting that there is something about the notional category of the present tense that allows humans from diverse cultures, times, and languages to use present tense forms in the same way. Second, both the historical present and futurates are only found in specific contexts. Some meaning component in these contexts allows or triggers these uses. For the historical present, this is narrative progression. The speaker may use the present tense to immerse the addressee in the time of the story itself to draw attention to part of the story. For futurates, the eventuality is scheduled or decided. The relevant meaning component here is the volitionality of the subject. Because futurates refer to events that happen in the future but have already been scheduled or decided, they imply that a volitional subject (a subject who can make decisions) is involved in the event. This predicts that if a volitional agent is not involved or the event cannot be planned, this use is not possible. Indeed, Copley (2008:261) notes that while the sentence The Red Sox play the Yankees tomorrow is fine, the unplannable event referred to in # The Red Sox defeat the Yankees tomorrow is not acceptable. Examples from NT Greek conform to this pattern. For these two reasons, we conclude that the present tense in Greek is a true present tense – we simply must adjust our notional category of what the present tense is from the overly simplistic definition of the event happening at the same time the utterance is made.

6 This is not to say that all who reject the Luo form as a true present tense have the wrong definition of tense. A notable exception is Olsen (1997). She says that neither Luo nor the Aorist are true tenses, and she presents about a dozen examples that are supposed to show that the tense analysis is untenable (1995:279–290). However, all of her examples have logical semantic explanations. To illustrate, she notes that over 50% of the Luo verbs with past reference are verbs of speaking, most being λέγω. The fact that a particular verb class is far more common than others for past reference suggests that there is some meaning component in verbs of speaking that allows it to be used in those contexts more readily. Indeed, verbs of speaking like λέγω are commonly used as complementizers to introduce content (Bassel 2022), and when they do so, their tense value may be bleached (wals.info/chapter/128). Verbs of speaking are also unique syntactically in English. Just as we cannot conclude that English has no default word order because of examples like ‘That’s not correct,’ said Sylvia (where said Sylvia is VS order, and English normally defaults to SV), so we cannot conclude that the Luo form is not a true present tense if there is a particular verb class that behaves differently. Space precludes going through all the other kinds of examples, but none are surprising given how present tense forms are used across languages (again see Pancheva & Zubizarreta 2023 for a discussion and semantic analysis).

For many in NT Greek grammatical studies, tense has fallen out of vogue. However, what has often been rejected is an overly simplistic definition of tense that no one in the field of linguistics would hold to in the first place, namely one that relates the time of speaking to the time of the eventuality (e.g. see Campbell 2024:28). Once we allow for a more nuanced definition of tense, the “problems” with the Luo and Aorist forms as real tenses disappear. Besides the historical present, we have explained several supposed counterexamples to the Aorist being a true tense in other sections (26.2.3.2, 21.1.3.2). Thus, we affirm that the Greek verb forms do indeed encode tense, rightly understood, in the indicative mood. Each of the form’s tense values can be seen in the following chart:

Aspect

Aspect (introduced in 5.1.3.2) is often informally described as the way that the speaker views the eventuality. This “viewing” of the eventuality is not spatial or physical – it is not as if the speaker uses aspect to describe whether he or she physically witnessed the event or is a certain distance away from it. Rather, the language of viewing is used as a metaphor for temporality: the speaker’s “viewing” refers to which temporal part(s) of the eventuality are being referenced (again, see my review of Campbell’s Basics of Verbal Aspect at Biblingo.org/blog for a more detailed discussion).

This description references two time intervals, similar to how tense makes reference to two time intervals. First, there is the interval of the eventuality itself. We have called this the Eventuality Time, or ET. In an event of building a Lego house, there is a starting point, when the pieces are everywhere, and an endpoint, when the pieces have been assembled. Eventualities of all kinds start and stop at various times, and the duration of the eventuality is a fact about the world and has nothing to do with how the speaker views it. The second interval is the time that the speaker is referring to, which we have called the Reference Time, or RT. If it takes me an entire afternoon to build a Lego house with my sons, I may want to refer to only part of the time that we were building, so I may say We were building a Lego house when a meteor struck our car. In this example, I am referencing a time that does not include the end of the building-a-Lego-house event. We were in the midst of doing it when something else happened. The progressive form be + - ing is used to refer to part of the building-a-Lego-house event, a part that does not include the end of that event. In other words, only part of the ET is included in the RT. Hence, aspect is fundamentally a relationship between these two temporal intervals, one which the speaker chooses (the RT) and one which is a fact about the world (the ET).

Utilizing this definition of aspect, we can provide simple definitions of the various aspects discussed in the literature. Just as the various tenses (past, present, and future) were the three possible relationships between the TA and the RT (RT before, during, and after TA), so the aspects are simply the logically possible relationships between the RT and the ET. At the outset, we note a complicating factor that we did not encounter with the tense relationships. The TA is ordinarily a point in time rather than an interval (the “moment of speaking” is normally a single moment), so it cannot extend beyond the RT. However, both eventualities and times that we talk about can be either points or intervals. Some eventualities, such as building a Lego house, last hours rather than a single moment in time, and we can just as easily refer to intervals of time (e.g. for 2 hours) as points of time (e.g. at 3 O’clock). Because the ET and RT can both be points or intervals, it is possible for either the ET to extend beyond the RT or the RT to extend beyond the ET. These time relations represent the basic distinction between imperfective and perfective aspect: imperfective is when the ET extends beyond the RT, and perfective is when the ET is included in the RT, as depicted in the diagrams.

The contrast between perfective and imperfective is often similarly indicated in many languages, including in Greek. Whereas perfective aspect seems to be marked by the Aorist, imperfective aspect has no marking. From a morphological standpoint, this is a matter of fact: the Aorist ἔνευσα has the -σ- that is found throughout the system as a perfective marker, and the corresponding imperfective is not marked at all. This marking is not merely a phonological difference, however. The Aorist seems to require that a temporal boundary of the ET is included in the RT (see 44.1.3.2). What is often called the imperfective forms, on the other hand (the Luo and Eluon forms or the “present” stem), has no such requirement, but moreover, it does not require that the ET extend beyond the RT. In other words, it does not actually encode imperfective aspect (at least as represented by Figure 8), as the following example demonstrates where a boundary is included in the RT (repeated from (313) above):

(315) Perfective interpretation of Luo

ἔρχεται Ἰησοῦς καὶ λαμβάνει τὸν ἄρτον καὶ δίδωσιν αὐτοῖς (John 21:13)

Jesus comes and takes the bread and gives (it) to them

In 10.4.3.2, we said that this was an example of the historical present, and we gave further justification for this analysis above. In 9.4.3.2, we also said that this was an example of a culminating interpretation. Jesus is not described as being in the midst of coming and taking the bread and giving it to his disciples – the narrative presents these events as happening in succession and each as ending one after the other. Narrative progression is one of the hallmarks of a perfective interpretation. In other words, this is a perfective interpretation of the Luo form.

The above examples show that the notional category of imperfective aspect is not expressed in Greek with a particular morpheme, at least if we define imperfective in the way that we have done (with the ET extending beyond the RT). We are again left with a conundrum – do we abandon the imperfective analysis of the Luo form, or do we revise our definition of imperfective? There is reason to again take the latter route in this case, just as we did for the present tense. In a language like English, we do not mark perfective aspect, but we do seem to mark what we called “imperfective” aspect above. The sentence Nick was running the race forces us to view only part of the event. Notice, that was running adds an additional morpheme, namely be + - ing (this form is normally called a progressive rather than imperfective). Koine Greek does the opposite. Instead of adding an additional morpheme for the imperfective-like meaning, an additional morpheme, namely -σ-, is added for the perfective meaning. Indeed, we have said that the Aorist always includes a temporal boundary, but the counterpart form, Eluon, may also include a temporal boundary but need not. Indeed, aspectologist Daniel Altshuler (2014:739) defines imperfective aspect in precisely this way when he says that imperfective aspect “requires a stage of an event … but this stage need not be maximal” (italics original). This allows the imperfective to have a culminating interpretation when the event being described has only one “stage” (a technical term in Altshuler’s theory whose technical definition need not concern us here). Defining imperfective in this way accounts for the distribution of the Luo and Eluon forms in Greek: they are interpreted identically to the perfective Aorist in some contexts, but these are limited to certain verb classes, and they also may receive the opposite interpretation, namely with the ET extending beyond the RT. The Luo and Eluon forms are imperfective in Altshuler’s sense in that they only require a stage of an event and this stage need not be maximal, but they are not imperfective in the sense that the required interpretation is that the ET extends beyond the RT (the semantics of which better reflects the English progressive form, i.e. be + - ing).9

Before concluding this section, it is worth fleshing out the differences between the English and Greek aspectual systems. While the English progressive cannot refer to a temporal boundary, the Greek Aorist necessarily refers to a temporal boundary, and both languages have forms in the middle (namely the English simple past, - ed, and the Greek Eluon) that may or may not refer to a temporal boundary. Because of how the different systems mark temporal boundaries, there will not be a one-to-one relationship between any of the forms. The imperfective forms in Greek, namely Luo and Eluon, may map onto either the progressive or the simple past/present tenses. In contrast, the Aorist may map onto the simple

It has long been noticed that the English progressive form does not combine with some types of states in a straightforward way (though as with everything else, this has been nuanced in various ways). Such facts about how verbs interact with grammatical aspect have led to the classification of verbs into categories with different features. This is what aktionsart is – it describes the properties of verbal descriptions of eventualities (this term was originally introduced in Sem A).10 The basic classification of eventualities goes back to the philosopher Zeno Vendler (1957) who came up with the following system:

In Sem A, we introduced telicity, stativity, durativity, and the category of achievement. An activity and accomplishment are both durative and dynamic (i.e. they involve change), but they differ in terms of telicity, or whether they have a natural endpoint or not. As many have noted, the same verb can be used as both an accomplishment and an activity depending on the nature of the verb’s argument. While Isaac played chess for hours is an activity, Isaac played the chess match of his life is an accomplishment, since it refers to a single chess-playing event with an endpoint.

We cannot begin to survey all the ways linguists have modified the initial Vendlerian categories. However, there are two foundational elements to aktionsart that are crucial for interpretation. First, although verbs themselves do indeed have certain properties, the nature of the eventuality that the verb refers to is also affected by the argument(s) that the verb combines with. The following contrast illustrates this:

• (317) a. We built a Lego house in 2 hours/*for 2 hours.
• b. We built Lego houses *in 2 hours/for 2 hours.

The only difference between the two sentences in (317) is the object. In (a), the object of built is a Lego house with a singular noun and an indefinite article. In (b), we have the bare plural Lego houses, i.e. a plural without an article. While the sentence in (a) naturally combines with an in -adverbial, such as in 2 hours, it is odd to have it combine with a for -adverbial, as in for 2 hours. The opposite holds for the (b) sentence with the bare plural. This and other similar facts have led linguists to speak of aktionsart as a property of the entire predicate (the verb and its arguments) rather than a property of the verb alone.

Before coming to how all of this is relevant for Greek, one more foundational concept must be discussed. Since we have defined aspect as the relationship between the ET and the RT, we should expect that changing the ET could affect the aspectual interpretation of the clause. This is clearly seen in the five readings of the perfect, as discussed in Kiparsky (2002) and to which we return below in discussion of the Greek Leluka form. Clauses in the perfect can have different interpretations, and certain interpretations are made possible or more or less salient depending on the nature of the predicate. One interpretation, for example, is the universal perfect. In this interpretation of the perfect, a state started in the past and continues to hold in the present moment, as illustrated in (318):

(318) Lydia has lived in Philippi for seven years, and indeed she still lives there.

This reading of the perfect requires a state, such as live. If we change the verb to an event like visit as in Lydia has visited Philippi, the universal perfect reading is no longer possible, since visit is not a state that can hold in the present. If we take out the length of the state so that we only have Lydia has lived in Philippi, we again lose the universal perfect interpretation. What this illustrates is that the interpretation of the perfect aspect is sensitive to the kinds of predicates that it combines with.

In linguistics, the perfect continues to generate debate about how precisely to characterize the temporal relationship it encodes. Part of the reason for this is that perfects across languages have different ranges of meaning. Like most areas of grammar, the English perfect (represented by the have + - en form) has received the most attention, and there have been 3 primary readings of the perfect that have been noted: the result perfect, the universal perfect, and the existential perfect. Returning to our example with Lydia, the sentence Lydia has visited Philippi is ambiguous between the result perfect reading and the existential reading. If I am in Philippi and excited about seeing Lydia who I know has just come, I might utter the sentence Lydia has visited Philippi meaning that she is now in Philippi. This is the result perfect reading where Lydia is in the result state of having visited a place, i.e. she is in that place. In other contexts, the existential reading is most salient. If I am talking to someone in Ephesus about all the places Lydia has visited in Greece, I might say Lydia has visited Philippi meaning she has visited the city at some point in the past. This is the existential reading where an event occurred that is relevant to the current discussion, but there is no natural result state of the event that holds in the present moment. As we have said, the universal perfect reading is demonstrated by Lydia has lived in Philippi for seven years (and indeed, she still lives there). This represents a past state that continues to hold in the present.

The Greek perfect has all three of these readings in addition to two other readings that are marginal at best in English. Discussions of each of the individual readings can be found in the following sections: result (19.1.4.2), existential (20.2.3.2), universal (38.2.3.2), stative (23.2.3.2), perfective (41.1.3.2). For convenience, examples from each of the sections are given here as well:

(319) Result perfect

ἰδοὺ τὸ ἄριστόν μου ἡτοίμακα (Matt 22:4) Look, I have prepared my dinner

(320) Existential perfect ἑωράκαμεν τὸν κύριον (John 20:25)

We have seen the lord

(321) Universal perfect τί ὧδε ἑστήκατε ὅλην τὴν ἡμέραν ἀργοί; (Matt 20:6)

Why have you stood here all day idle?

(322) Stative perfect οἶδα ὅτι Μεσσίας ἔρχεται ὁ λεγόμενος χριστός I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ

13 Two other readings of the perfect are often given. First, the recent past reading in a sentence like The cubs have won the World Series is often noted. This is usually subsumed under the result perfect or existential perfect. The other reading, which is marginal in English, is the present stative reading in a sentence like I’ve got five dollars in my pocket. This interpretation only seems possible with the cliticized – ‘ve form, and I do not know if it is possible with verbs besides get. Because of this limited distribution in English, the pure state reading has received little attention in the literature.

14 The readings outlined contradict common definitions of the perfect, namely a “past action with continuing results” or “stative.” The former definition assumes that we are talking about an action, which would imply, against the data, that Leluka does not combine with states. It is true that Leluka may refer to a past action with continuing results, but it may also refer to a past state that continues to hold in the present, as evidenced by the universal perfect interpretation. The so-called stative aspect theory is closer in that one could argue for a stative element even in the existential perfect reading (one can be in the state of having completed an action), but it is misleading at best to call a form stative that combines with non-stative eventualities. The term stative refers to an eventuality type (i.e. an aktionsart), not a temporal relationship between the RT and ET (i.e. an aspect). For a short summary of the various ways the perfect has been described, see Köstenberger, Merkle, and Plummer (2020:299–300) and for more on the debate within NT studies, see The Perfect Storm. For a lucid discussion of many of the issues in the field as well as a description using the standard linguistics definition of aspect, see Crellin (2016).

What remains is to summarize how the interpretations of Leluka interact with different kinds of verbal predicates. These are given in the following chart:

The purpose of this chart is to show how aktionsart and aspect interact to produce a given interpretation. The result perfect is, by definition, a state that holds on account of a prior event. Thus, this interpretation requires a [+ telic] aktionsart for the predicate because the result of the event needs to be specified, it being explicitly referred to in the interpretation. The existential perfect is unique in that it does not place any particular demands on the kind of predicate, though eventive atelic verbs will normally receive the existential interpretation (particularly because the perfective reading is not common in Koine). The universal reading requires a state, but it also requires the duration of the state to be explicitly given. The stative perfect requires a stative predicate with a presupposed causing event, and the perfective requires an eventive predicate. It must be noted that it is rarely the case that you can determine the interpretation from the nature of the predicate alone. The chart provided helps you to rule out certain interpretations, but it never tells you how to interpret any given instance of the perfect. A predicate that is [+ telic], for example, might be a result perfect, but it could also be an existential or even (rarely) a perfective. Likewise, even a stative predicate with the duration specified could be an existential, universal, or stative perfect. You cannot, therefore, conclude that a certain aktionsart value will always lead to a particular interpretation, but the chart can help you to narrow down the options.

Conclusion

This discussion has barely scratched the surface of tense and aspect studies in linguistics. It is not without reason that Kai von Fintel describes the semantics of tense and aspect (along with determiners and quantifiers) as the “bread and butter of working semanticists” (1995:177–178). Two final words of caution are then needed. First, do not equate verbal forms with pragmatic functions like “importance” or “emphasis.” They refer to temporal relationships; while significant, their “exegetical significance” should not be overplayed. Second, do not jump to conclusions. The reason why working semanticists make a living off of analyzing tense and aspect is because it is complicated. Our analyses are almost always incomplete, and our descriptions can almost always be refined.