You may have noticed that my blogging content is down. This is a combination of some sort of flu sweeping the family, finally purchasing my first new computer since 2003 (!), and preparing papers for SBL. I finished a draft of my Greek paper on the historical present a while back, and am letting that percolate. It turned into three separate papers, two of which should be ready to post by the time I head to the airport on Nov. 15th. The first one considers whether the historical present is best understood as prototypical usage, as seems to be the claim of Porter and Decker. It is the natural prominence of the present over against the aorist that makes it stand out, hence this effect should be found anywhere the two co-occur. I claim that it is best understood as non-prototypical usage, hence the particular pragmatic effects associated with its use only in narrative proper, not in reported speeches or epistolary genre. This paper also presents a processing hierarchy for determining whether it is serving to segment the text (i.e. signaling a boundary in the discourse) from pragmatic highlighting (i.e. drawing attention to a significant speech or event that follows). This is not the paper I will be delivering, but will submit it for publication.

The second paper considers the implications of the first. If the HP is best understood as marked, non-prototypical usage, then what are the ramifications for the overall aspectual picture? Those advocating the absence of tense in the Greek verbal system have used the distributional criteria as the primary motivation for proposing an alternative framework. The present has been the poster child tense-form for arguing against the presence of any tense, since it is found in past, present, future and atemporal contexts. The ramifications of considering the the HP to be marked rather than prototypical are huge, greatly impacting the distributional data which lead to the need for an alternative. In reading the dead grammarians, it is interesting that most patently claim that Koine is a mixed system, grammaticalizing both tense and kind-of-action. Winer notes that it is not the grammarians who have generally misunderstood the system as much as the commentators, with the latter making excessive claims. I expect the same is true today, with some exegetes making claims from Porter’s model that he would likely not support. At any rate, I will be reconsidering the distributional data from Decker’s work in Mark to illustrate the implications and explanatory power of this seemingly minor change regarding the HP.

I finally began my Hebrew paper on Saturday in response to increasing occurrence of panic attacks. 🙂 I have been conceptualizing it for some time, collecting the needed examples. I began section two of three yesterday, so hopefully I can have the draft completed next week in time to set it aside and let it percolate.

I leave for the conferences a few days early in order to attend a colloquium on using electronic resources for teaching biblical languages at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids. I will be presenting the suite of NT discourse materials, illustrating how the annotated database and discourse grammar can be used to introduce students to discourse principles far earlier and more effectively than is currently possible. Both Levinsohn and I have found that few either have the aptitude or time to thoroughly learn how to analyze discourse, especially when it comes to information structure.  In teaching first year Greek I found that the discourse explanation of things like conjunctions and verbs better enabled students to understand what a constituent was doing even if they could not find a suitable gloss or translation. I will be giving this same presentation at SBL on Sunday afternoon at an additional meeting.

Well, my daughter is up, so time to go.