I am approaching the last post on a series critiquing Stan Porter’s theoretical framework for describing verbal aspect. The first post presented overlooked research from the core literature he cites on just how complex and interwoven tense and aspect are. Tense, aspect and mood are like Siamese triplets, not neatly divisible like “number” or “person,” especially in Greek. The next two posts (here and here) focused on Porter’s claims that each aspect plays a certain prominence role (e.g. imperfective aspect always portrays the foreground of the discourse). These claims disregard genre, meaning that the imperfective foregrounds the action not just in narrative, but globally in all genres, according to Porter. This claim lacks any merit based on the literature he cites. Linguists recognize that genre affects grounding and prominence, leaving Porter’s claim of global prominence suspect. Finally, I noted that Porter adopts a secondary set of terms in an apparent attempt to address this criticism about genre. It is essentially a work around, and fails to resolve the fundamental contradiction between his genre-blind claims on the one hand, and the the genre-specific claims of the literature he cites.
So far in this series you may have noticed that I remained silent about the matter of “frontground” in Porter’s model. In my view, it represents one of the most significant assertions that Porter makes in Verbal Aspect, that Koine Greek manifests a third level of grounding in addition to background and foreground. I describe it as significant both because of its critical role in his overall model of prominence, and because of its divergence from the broader linguistic literature on grounding. To provide some context, it is important to understand how and why Porter justifies the need for a third level of grounding. Despite its significance to his model, Porter devotes only a few pages to developing the idea. I will quote the entire section in order to provide the proper context for his statements before going back and analyzing its components. It contains a number of parenthetical statements, making the text difficult to read. I have restructured it so that the longer parentheticals are now footnotes, but it is quoted in its entirety. I have bolded key statements for easier reference. He states:
“Drawing upon the insights of “perceptual psychology,” Wallace (“Figure” [quotation 201] cf. 213, where he notes the connection with Gestalt psychology) and Hopper (“Aspect,” esp. 213-16) attempt to reconstruct traditional understanding of aspect (Wallace also treats Mood and tense)1 utilizing studies of discourse analysis that divide the planes of discourse into two: “foreground and background.” As Hopper says: “It is evidently a universal of narrative discourse that in any extended text an overt distinction is made between the language of the actual story line and the language of supportive material which does not itself narrate the main events.”2 Thus in Greek the Aorist is the background tense which carries the discourse and the Present/Imperfect is the figure or foreground tense.3 It is noteworthy that in Greek often the basic narrative is laid down by the 3d Person Aorist, a common trait of the background tense, while the Imperfect/Present introduces significant characters or makes appropriate climactic references to concrete situations, typical of the foreground tense. Also, when an extended noteworthy description is given, the foreground tense is used.4 Wallace only indirectly refers to other possible tense categories,5 but it is possible to posit a third plane of exposition, called here frontground. Rather than seeing the Perfect as giving further background information, it seems to provide a narrower range of the characteristic features (214) of the figure tense: it is discrete, well-defined and contoured, apparently much more so than the Present/Imperfect and certainly the Aorist tenses. Wallace’s hypothesis, which seems helpful for discussion of Greek tenses, is “that linguistic categories … function to differentiate linguistic figure from linguistic ground: the speaker uses such categories to structure an utterance … into more or less salient portions, and the listener uses such categories as clues to interpreting the speaker’s verbal picture” (214).6
There are a host of issues here that need to be addressed, so I will be selective. Let’s begin with the issue of terminology. Recall that Porter inverts the meaning of background and foreground, compared to the characteristic use by the linguists whom he cites like Wallace and Hopper. Porter uses “background” to refer to the “mainline” or “figure” of the discourse, whereas he uses “foreground” to refer to what most others call the “offline” or “ground” of the discourse.7 Note that Porter bases what is essentially a global prominence claim about the grounding value of perfective and imperfective aspects on Hopper’s clearly limited observation about narrative proper. He does not restrict it to narrative as Hopper does. Porter adds the parenthetical comment that while Hopper only addresses narrative, “Wallace applies this model to non-narrative discourse as well.”8 Indeed he does, but Porter fails to mention that Wallace argues for a different foreground tense in non-narrative: the present. This seems like an important detail, already covered beginning here.
Recall also that the prominence value of a given aspect varies from genre to genre (contra Porter), as noted here. In Wallace’s discussion of narrative proper, he asserts that the Perfect tense-form falls into the “background/offline” category, not the “foreground” occupied by the aorist in Greek.9 When Porter argues that the Stative aspect has been wrongly classified, note that he is using Wallace and Hopper’s terminology of “background,” meaning that which is offline and does not advance the discourse: “Rather than seeing the Perfect as giving further background information, it seems to provide a narrower range of the characteristic features (214) of the figure tense: it is discrete, well-defined and contoured, apparently much more so than the Present/Imperfect and certainly the Aorist tenses.”10 But Porter fails to point out or discuss the counter-evidence provided bythe very same table in Wallace’s article: that nonperfective, noneventive, stative verbs are claimed to be background/offline.
Fundamentally, Porter is arguing that the Stative aspect is more like the Imperfective than the Perfective, so to that extent he is in agreement with the linguistic literature on grounding. This literature consistently views the non-perfective aspects as “background/offline in narrative, whereas things are different in non-narrative. Most of the literature that Porter cites (including most of Wallace) is focused on narrative only. At the very least it should have been clear to him that claiming the Stative aspect is the most prominent in narrative proper lacks any support whatsoever from the literature he cites. Yet if he understood this opposition, he failed to provide any argumentation substantiating or defending his rationale for making such a drastic break with conventional linguistic wisdom. It makes no sense that one of his most significant claims–the existence of a frontground level–receives only a few sentences of discussion. Based on the absence of literature to corroborate his claim, and the absence of any argumentation to justify its inclusion, Porter’s claims about “frontground” in Greek are baseless and without merit.
Porter has three options, as I see it. First, produce peer-reviewed evidence that other linguists (besides those applying his model) are using a comparable framework to make comparable claims about the prominence of verbal aspect. Second, produce a coherent theoretical argument to justify the inclusion of frontground that can be understood as a logical extension anticipated by the existing literature. Finally, to abandon his tripartite model in favor of one more consistent with the overwhelming majority of linguistic literature on grounding and aspect, one that respects the impact that changes in genre have on prominence.
Return to On Porter, Prominence and Aspect
- Footnote in original: It is not necessary here to make a thorough critique of Wallace to appreciate his contribution. He finds himself caught in a dilemma between seeing the tenses as confused on temporal reference and not wanting to deny that “time is an important semantic property of the categories of tense” (203). Also, his attempt at a universal grammar leads him to make mistakes in his treatment of and application to individual languages (e.g. 204, 208, 215). [↩]
- “Aspect,” 213; whereas Hopper focuses on narrative, Wallace applies this model to non-narrative discourse as well [↩]
- see e.g. Kuhner/Gerth, 1.157; Gildersleeve, 91; Schwyzer, 2.275; contra Wallace and Hopper [↩]
- See Wallace, “Figure,” 212, cf. 214; and Hopper, “Aspect,” 216, for categorization of linguistic features. Rijksbaron [12-13] and Weinrich [Tempus, 288-93; “Tense”] follow Wallace and Hopper. [↩]
- 209, 210; on 216, he notes the problem of tense in his system [↩]
- Porter, Verbal Aspect, 92-93. [↩]
- This inversion is seen in his statement above: “It is noteworthy that in Greek often the basic narrative is laid down by the 3d Person Aorist, a common trait of the background tense, while the Imperfect/Present introduces significant characters or makes appropriate climactic references to concrete situations, typical of the foreground tense.” (Ibid., 92.) [↩]
- Porter, Verbal Aspect, 92. [↩]
- Wallace, “Figure and Ground,” 208-9. [↩]
- Porter, Verbal Aspect, 92. Bolding mine. [↩]
