21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 3, definitions

Last week I just listed the skeleton for defining verbs. This post gives brief definitions for terms in the verbal system.

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”; 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 1^st or 2^nd 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 (“2^nd aorist” or “2^nd 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.