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

But discourse grammar is not merely complementary to traditional grammar in some areas, but it seems to have more theoretically grounded or at least a better satisfying approach. In particular, I have found that discourse grammar provides (at least to me) a better explanation for the use and non-use of the article with unique references (e.g., God, proper names, etc.) than the traditional grammar. This is also true for connective particles.

Romans 1:14-15 are the last main propositions before the strengthening material of vv. 16-17. You need to answer what v. 18 is strengthening. What precedes, of course, but WHICH what precedes, the last main propositions or the strengthening. This is where the flow of the discourse comes in, since the connective is ambiguous on the matter. In either case, the strengthening constraint remains unchanged.

My undergraduate and graduate training in NT Greek included both basic grammar and discourse analysis. As I continue to read, study and interact with biblical scholars, I can relate to “Grasshopper’s” e-mail above in that I am having more success in reading larger sections of text and looking for flow and connection as opposed to (or at least less than) the parsed form and category. But then, I begin to wonder how much I am prone to “steering” the text vs. drawing out the meaning.

Case in point, I am reading Doug Campbell’s Deliverance of God. In short, he states that γάρ in Romans 1:18 is NOT the traditionally understood continued thought of Paul, but a transition to an opponent’s voice in the form of “speech-in-character” or προσωποποιία. I find his case plausible on a number of fronts, but also see the tension between possibilities in the flow of argument in Greco-Roman rhetoric and the traditionally held grammatical categories for the conjunction.

Further, I can see this as both affirming or negating Levinsohn’s basic premise that “γάρ always serves a single function in discourse: to signal that what follows strengthens or supports what precedes.” The supporting material could be the opponent’s!

So, can meaning be determined at that level, by looking first to the flow of the discourse and then by affirming it with grammar? What happens if the flow of the argument and the meaning is a great fit, but the grammar conflicts with the potential discourse? Must we fall back on hard grammatical categories?

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.