Regarding Decker’s work, he does not make the same claims regarding prominence value of the various aspects, so in that sense there is nothing to comment on. On the other hand, contrastive substitution is a significant proof offered by Decker, which I have called into question not just in Porter’s application, but more generally. One could make the same kind of “successful application” claim about Porter as you make about Decker. Porter is the originator of the claim of timelessness and the approach to verbal aspect. For that reason, primary focus is on Porter, not Decker’s secondary application.

Furthermore, Decker claims that Porter’s claims are reasonable based on his findings in Mark. There are a number of implications from my posts for Decker’s work, but Decker is only applying what someone else has developed. I addressed Decker directly in my historical present paper, showing how his own data can more reasonably be reconstrued to argue for a mixed tense/aspect system.

I do not plan on making verbal aspect my primary research focus. I found a number of troubling issues in studying the historical present. I plan on addressing those issues, and then likely offering some kind of holistic, alternative explanation at some point. I am more interested in sounding a warning to the guild that there are significant problems with Porter’s model, lest others build on the faulty foundation without having come to terms with them. I will leave it to others to work out all of the broader implications. Mostly I look forward to hearing something directly from Porter and Decker in response to these papers, once they are completed. The work I am engaging is 10-20 years old, and things change in that time period. Porter seems to have affirmed his positions based on his “Prominence” paper in the 2009 publication. I have not talked to Decker about the matter.

I will continued to focus on the big picture issues until they are sufficiently addressed, only then moving on to more specific things. While Porter’s research is the main focus, there are implications for both Campbell and Decker as well. Once the papers on markedness and prominence, I will work on more specific issues.

I just had a quick question or two concerning your “Theoretical Framework” post. First of all, I completely agree with your comments. It seems clear to me that we must have a sound theoretical foundation in place if there is to be any fruit to our “language-in-use” approach to NT Greek.

However, I’d like to pick your brain a little bit about some of your criticisms of Porter. Above, you note that Porter’s model has drawn quite a bit of critique recently, and that “these recurring problems in the field application [of the model]” are why you yourself are questioning its theoretical rudiments. This point is well taken. But, why not mention (at least in a footnote) the work of Rodney Decker, who at least claims to have successfully applied Porter’s model to the verbal system throughout the entire Gospel of Mark? Indeed, perhaps Decker’s focus is more on the notion of aspect vs. temporal reference, and not aspect-prominence; but did not his work nonetheless validate Porter’s grander model? Any thoughts?

Also, I wanted to ask you what you think the primary difference is between Porter’s approach to the perfect as the most semantically weighted of the tense-forms and that of Con Campbell. Would I be right in judging that Porter takes more of a morphological approach (i.e., the presence of reduplication, etc.), whereas Campbell’s concerns the concept of spatial proximity?

Your thoughts would be valuable.

Wally

Perhaps in some sense, maybe this is why I’ve had problems learning Greek and Hebrew.

I’m wondering in the field of New Testament interpretation, what constitutes the discipline of retracing one’s steps to see whether one map or the other was correct? We can’t ask the authors what exactly they had in mind.