Jody A. Barnard 6 He then proceeds to give an example from Acts 16,1-5, which has been assimilated into a recent commentary on Acts14. But is such an apparen- tly uncritical acceptance of Porter’s view legitimate? Almost the exact opposite to Porter’s proposal is advocated by Fanning who states that “as a means of showing prominence, the aorist can be used to narrate the main or ‘foreground’ events, while the imperfect or present is used to record subsidiary or ‘background’ ones”15. Both Porter and Fanning articulate their views with regard to Stephen Wallace’s essay on Figure and Ground: The Interrelationships of Linguis- tic Categories in which he argues that: If a language has a contrast between a perfective (completive, non-du- rative, punctual) aspect and other aspects, then part of the meaning of the perfective aspect, at least in narration, is to specify major, sequential, fore- grounded events, while the meaning of the contrasting non-perfective aspects, particularly an imperfective, is to give supportive background information16. It would seem that scholarship was driving the discourse prominen- ce value of verbal aspect in a particular direction, whereas Porter has applied the brakes and proposed a U-turn. Porter charges Wallace with mistreating individual languages out of a desire for a universal gram- mar, meaning that Wallace’s conclusion is not applicable to the Greek of the New Testament17 whereas Fanning fully endorses the conclusions of Wallace as applicable to the Greek of the New Testament18. So who is correct? Is verbal aspect a prominence indicator, and if so, how? M.M. Culy and M.C. Parsons, Acts: A Handbook on the Greek Text (Waco 2003) 14 305-06, xv-xvi. See also J.T. Reed, “Identifying Theme in the New Testament”, in Porter and Carson (eds.), Discourse Analysis and Other Topics in Biblical Greek (Sheffield 1995) 84-85; J.T. Reed and R.A. Reese, “Verbal Aspect, Discourse Prominence and the Letter of Jude”, Filogía Neotestamentaria 9 (1996) 186-90; and more cautiously T. Klutz, “Naked and Wounded: Foregrounding, Relevance and Situation in Acts 19.13-20”, in Porter and Reed (eds.), Discourse Analysis and the New Testament (Sheffield 1999) 263-67, though his caution seems to have disappeared in The Exorcism Stories in Luke-Acts: A Sociostylistic Reading (Cambridge 2004) 49-50, 107-09, 172-73. Fanning, Aspect, 191. See also Levinsohn, Discourse, 173-5; Mckay, Syntax, 42. 15 S. Wallace, “Figure and Ground: The interrelationships of Linguistic Categories”, in 16 P.J. Hopper (ed.), Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics (Amsterdam 1982) 209. Porter, Aspect, 92. 17 Fanning, Aspect, 75. 18