[homeskillet]

Does anyone have an idea about where the future tense fits into our discussion of verbal aspect? Is the future tense telic or atelic? Or is it some other type of aspect... like the future aspect?

-hombre

[I am not Josiah Helsel]

I seem to recall some discussion in Machen about the lack of a future aorist. It was super rare, I believe. The closest thing we have is the proleptic aorist (see Wallace, 593), and that construction uses plain old aorist indicative. Only context will determine it.
Given that there is no future aorist, it seems to me that the aspect of future action would (by default, I suppose) lean toward the atelic side. And that makes sense, because, well, just how does one talk about aspectual action in the future? Would one say, "I am going to iteratively be going shopping"? Or how about, "I am going to simply go shop?" The future is a much more fuzzy time, since we don't know exactly when action will occur (unlike the past, where action is frozen and known and can be spoken of in relation to other action).
Yeah, I'm going to go listen to some Green Day,
Ouk eimi Iosia

[homeskillet]

OK. I think that I might actually be more confused now.

Can I say: there are three aspects in Greek (present, aorist, and perfect; within the present aspect there are three tenses [future, contemporaneous, and imperfect]; within the aorist aspect there are no real tenses because tense doesn't matter so much [bearing in mind that the aorist can be used contemporaneously or simple-perfectly, or pluperfectly]; within the perfect aspect there are two tenses [simple perfect, and pluperfect])?

I guess that my question underneath all this jargon is what are the main categories for verbs? Are they best understood when we sort by principle part? By time? By apsect?

Like a sheep runs from the herd.

[Frank]

Aren't the aspects telic and atelic, and the other things tenses?

[petemo]

Here's a short quote from Wallis that may help:
"With reference to _aspect_, the future seems to offer an _external_ portrayal, something of a temporal counterpart to the aorist indicative" (566).

petemo

[petemo]

Oh, one other thing--a thought on Homeskillet's question of how to best categorize verbs.

I think its easiest to _categorize_ the verb in its most _unaffected_ setting, namely, morphology. Morphology in turn determines tense, and the tense includes time and aspect. If we start with aspect, we muddy general categories with the specific lexical and contextual factors that are bound up with aspect. If we start with time, we again run into semantic issues informed by context (for example, the proleptic aorist is proleptic by virtue of context, rather than by something inherent in the verb itself).
The usefulness of this approach is confirmed by Wallace's dividing his discussion of verbs into tenses, then under each tense discussing the appropriate aspectual nuances. It can also be seen in the Baugh/Schwandt method for determining a verb's meaning--one starts the process by parsing, that is, by examining morphology.
Hope this helps,
petemo

[disciple]