Friday I went through the 44 or so posts I had written for this thread but not posted. I found 11 with fairly new information, but they mostly had to do with conditionals. So I decided to go straight to the summaries of the grammar I've been giving you. It's 20 posts, so we're near the end.
The Classical Greek verbal system as used in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War is aspectual, not tense based.
1.
Aspect – nuance of verbal
meaning such as simple action, habit, or result.
2.
Voice – also called diathesis,
carries the nuance of deliberate decision or intransitivity, and base voice for
everything else
3.
Definiteness – stating the
action, describing the action, or substantivizing the action
4.
Certainty – knowledge of
whether the action occurred or is likely to occur
5.
Transitivity – whether the grammatical
subject of the verb is the agent or the logical object
6. Verb class – ending of the dictionary entry and whether the verb root contracts during conjugation
Each of these vectors has three
parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.
1.
Aspect
a.
Imperfective – implies nothing
about result, which may fade away or be reversed; used for motion in
alternating directions and often for imperatives intended to produce an action.
b.
Progressive – formation or
existence of a habit or situation; used for imperatives intended to produce a
state.
c.
Perfective – action creating
a permanent result. Imperative is periphrastic and very rare.
2.
Voice
a.
Executive – action deliberately
undertaken to produce its ordinary outcome. Exists only for non-mai verbs
b.
Passive – intransitive action
in a specific structure. Exists only for -mai verbs and imperfective non-mai
verbs.
c.
Base – all other uses
3.
Definiteness
a.
Conjugation – statement of
the action
b.
Personal gerundive – description
of the action
c.
Impersonal gerundive –
substantivized action or complement expressing purpose; used for actions that
are due and owing, a quasi-imperative lacking the nuance of immediacy.
4.
Certainty
a.
Indicative – direct statement
of action, including imperatives.
b.
Oblique – statement of
highly probable action or used in an attempt to persuade.
c.
Epistemic – speaker is not
heavily invested in the truth of what is said.
5.
Transitivity
a.
Transitive – agent and
object are distinct and use different cases, often -oi and -ous cases
respectively. Case of object affects meaning of the verb+predicate phrase.
b.
Ergative (intransitive
imperfective or perfective) structure – object in -oi case, agent in hupo
plus genitive. verb has an “aor. 2” form but can be in any aspect as we saw
in III 11.2.
c. Intransitive (passive voice) structure – a noun in -oi case which is both subject and object.
6.
Verb class
a.
-mi – high-frequency verbs
like give, take, go, “be”; a number of -mi verbs like histimi and tithimi
have intransitive imperfective and perfective morphology.
b.
-mai – no executive voice;
if there is a non-mai verb with the same meaning, the -mai verb will be used to
evaluate the action. Formerly called “deponent”, some -mai dictionary entries
actually belong to suppletive verbs.
c. non-mai verbs with all voices, except that progressive and perfective have no passive. Some like timao and poieo lose vowels in the 1st or 2nd syllable of the root.
The flavors of aspect are eventive, which is often marked by augment, or conceptual.
Some verbal vectors require a specific
structure, as well as specific morphology:
1.
Ergative – a verbal plus hupo
plus the agent in the -on case, where the verb is a specifically
intransitive form (“2nd aorist” or “2nd perfect”), with
an object in the -oi noun case
2.
Passive – specific verbal
morphology with a noun in the -oi case as both subject and object.
3. Anti-passive – a verbal plus an impersonal gerundive which is its complement; the object of the verbal is the subject of the i.g. and comes between them.
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