This volume grew out of the ‘International Colloquium on Greek Linguistics’ in Ghent in 2011. It is not just a conference collection, however. It has a clear focus on Greek tense and aspect; the chapters, many of which are important contributions to the study of Greek, work together organically to give an overview of the state of the art of Greek grammar after four decades of the interaction of functional approaches to the Greek language with other modern work in Greek linguistics. The chapters are generally clearly and accessibly written, so the volume will also be useful for non-specialists who want a sense of the lasting contributions of recent work. There are twelve chapters (a general introduction followed by eleven contributions on specific aspects of Greek mood, tense and aspect). For reasons of space I have picked seven chapters to talk about briefly.

G.C. Wakker's ‘The Gnomic Aorist in Hesiod’ resumes a suggestion made by A. Rijksbaron (The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek [1984]) on the choice of the aorist. The chapter is a useful overview of the Hesiodic examples, which touches helpfully on more recent discussion of the augment. She shows how the ‘omnitemporality’ of this aorist is always signalled by other elements in the immediate context, specifically the present tense and particles such as τε. The aorist encodes aspect (the characteristic perfective aspect of the Greek aorist for simple completed action); the past time reference that the tense usually includes is sacrificed (made non-salient) for the sake of the aspect. A sentence that may puzzle readers who do not have Rijksbaron's Syntax to hand is ‘the aorist is used for aspectual reasons but … due to the lack of the optimal verb form, i.e., an indicative i aorist, a second best option is chosen, the indicative ii aorist, expressing the desired aspect’ (p. 92). Here ‘indicative i aorist’ means an aorist with primary time reference and is contrasted with both the ‘indicative i present’, the present tense, and the familiar aorist with secondary or past time reference (ii aorist).

R.J. Allan's ‘The Imperfect Unbound. A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Greek Aspect’ is essential reading for anyone interested in why verbs in Greek unexpectedly appear in the imperfect tense, when it is clear that this does not denote incomplete or ongoing action. The question why a Greek author selected a present (imperfective) or an aorist stem has in various guises been at the heart of the project to give a pragmatic (functional) account of Greek grammar since the field was developed in the 1980s. There have been various interesting attempts to crack the use of the imperfect indicative in narrative prose, historical prose in particular. Allan, building on 30 years of work, particularly by Dutch scholars, seems to me to have arrived at the definitive explanation of an important category, which he describes as the ‘marker of the continuing relevance of the event’ (p. 101). He builds on a use of verbs like πέμπω in which it has long been seen that the imperfect denotes Fortwirkung (cf. the useful discussion in R. Martínez Vázquez, ‘Sobre el imperfecto de “efecto prolongado” en Griego’, Habis 41 [2010], 7–21). Allan contextualises his discussion in a nuanced account of aspect and Aktionsart, and the chapter would also be an excellent introduction to event structure (telicity and Z. Vendler's categories) for anyone looking for a critical account of recent work in the field of ancient Greek.

A.R. Revuelta Puigdollers's enjoyable essay ‘Ὤφελ(λ)ον in Ancient Greek Counterfactual Desiderative Sentences: from Verb to Modal Particle’ gives the answers to a range of questions that we think we understand from a reading knowledge of Greek, but would be embarrassed to explain in detail. It gives a lucid and interesting overview of the verb and how it became a particle expressing illocutionary force. In principle it is not surprising that a past tense can develop into a mood (cf. Engl. owe/ought and many other examples); in this case the development is complicated by analogy (εἴθε, εἰ γάρ), Atticism and the phonological confusion of ὤφ- and ὄφ- in later Greek.

G. Horrocks's “‘High” and “Low” in Medieval Greek’ is a prod to serious thinking about the High written variety in a diglossic culture. It draws attention to a common approach to the H variety, which sees it as a straightforward reproduction of the syntax of the older classical language with deviations as simple mistakes. Horrocks asks whether ‘the Byzantines learned it as an autonomous “dead language” (as we must) or rather as a variety of contemporary Greek characterized by distinctive grammatical, lexical and stylistic “transpositions”’ (p. 234). It is an important point; this special relationship of ‘ownership’ of the H language is a reason the term diglossia should be restricted to contexts where L (the first language of all speakers) is a form of H. Horrocks's argument for Greek is supported by recent work on the Arabic continuum (vernacular to modern standard Arabic), which points to a similar conclusion.

J. Méndez Dosuna, ‘Syntactic Variation with Verbs of Perception and the “Oblique Imperfect”: Once Again on Aspect, Relative Time Reference and Purported Tense-Backshifting in Ancient Greek’, proves in a useful and detailed argument that a late-twentieth century attempt by a distinguished Dutch school of linguists (C.J. Ruijgh, followed by Rijksbaron and others) to see relative time encoded in Greek participles, and other parts of the Greek verb, is completely incorrect. This is important, because relative time is intuitive to speakers of most European languages, and the view can be seen creeping into teaching materials. As Méndez Dosuna, following all the major grammarians of Greek, notes, ‘the ordering of events was a matter of discourse pragmatics depending on the context and commonsensical implicatures’ (p. 62). The demonstration is connected in an interesting way with discussion of the alleged ‘oblique imperfect’ (Thessalian and Attic) and the optative in reported speech, neither of which has anything to do with temporal backshift.

A. Lillo's ‘Subjunctive and Optative in Herodotus’ Purpose Clauses as Relative Tense Markers’ considers the alternation between the two moods after a historic main verb, especially when both a subjunctive and an optative follow in two separate clauses. He questions whether optatives in this context in Herodotus are ‘used to express a remote or secondary purpose’ (p. 11) as contrasted with an immediate purpose expressed with the subjunctive (the consensus view). At Herodotus 8.76.2 the usual explanation seems sufficient to capture the difference: the subjunctive reflects the direct words of the order, while the optative is a ‘big picture’ goal, a reasonable authorial interpretation of the Persians’ motivation:

Lillo supposes that the Persian ships had two different missions: to prevent the Greeks from sailing to the Peloponnese and to take their revenge for the events in Artemisium (once they had caught them). This seems to me a peculiar interpretation. He argues that an optative indicates an action prior to an action expressed with the subjunctive. The subjunctive ‘refers to an action that would take place after the action of the main action’ (p. 18), while the optative ‘indicates the natural result of the fulfilment of the action expressed in the main clause, which occurs while producing that which is indicated in this main clause’ (my italics, p. 17). It is hard to square this with the Greek evidence. It is true that examples remain that are hard to explain; Lillo cites Herodotus 8.6.2:

It may not be possible to formulate a rule that captures every alternation, but avenues of enquiry which might be fruitful are (a) the collocation of mood with particles (here μὲν δή), (b) the distinction between the narrator's perspective and that of the agents portrayed, and the wider narratological context, and (c) the effect of negatives. These are likely to overlap. Interesting work has already been done in these areas, not, unfortunately, cited by Lillo: see M. Biraud, ‘Les voix narratives dans les subordonnées exprimant l'intentionnalité dans les Histoires d'Hérodote’, Cahiers de Narratologie 10.1 (2001), and J. Méndez Dosuna, ‘La valeur de l'optatif oblique grec: un regard fonctionnel-typologique’, in B. Jacquinod (ed.), Les complétives en grec ancien (1999), pp. 331–53.

J. Kavčič’s ‘Variation in Expressing Temporal and Aspectual Distinctions in Complement Clauses: a Study of the Greek Non-Literary Papyri of the Roman Period’ is a study of the infinitive in declarative sentences (in effect, indirect speech as opposed to ‘dynamic’ infinitives after verbs of wanting, ordering etc.) in post-classical Greek, when the infinitive was starting its retreat from the language. Kavčič is interested in the striking decline of the aorist infinitive, which seems often to be replaced by the perfect infinitive, and the relationship with the status of the present infinitive (overwhelmingly ‘stative’ according to Kavčič) and the future infinitive (vanishingly rare in the NT, much less rare in the papyri). Kavčič’s study is based primarily on the New Testament and a corpus of roughly contemporary papyri (she distinguishes between private and official documents), but there is also interesting citation of literary parallels. She argues, surely correctly, that the avoidance of the aorist and the frequency of the perfect infinitive is not an argument against the merger of the two tenses that is detectable in post-classical Greek; she concludes very plausibly that present, future and perfect infinitives were used (at least in the first century bce–first century ce) to express time. I guess that the replacement of the aorist by the perfect infinitive was the result of a number of factors working together, including (a) the morphological complexity of the aorist (some stems look perfective, others imperfective), combined with suppletion, (b) the aspectual force of the aorist, (c) the phonological coincidence with the future in vernacular Greek, and (d) the functional merger of aorist and perfect indicative (Kavčič touches on some of these in a slightly crisper treatment in Journal of Greek Linguistics 16 [2016], 266–311). That most present infinitives are ‘stative’, and (in the NT at least) the verb to be accounts for around two thirds of all cases, suggests that figures are skewed by the appearance of copular clauses of various types in indirect discourse. Whether it is helpful to designate all of these as stative, and whether in fact there is a taxonomy of copular clauses, would be interesting questions to consider.