4 Alexander C. Loney tain cases a proper assessment of Luke’s reasoned choice between aspects has exegetical implications, although, due to the non-referential nature of verbal aspect, caution is required on this point. It has often been the case that exegesis predicated on verbal tense-forms has proceeded from an abused notion of Aktionsart, which, put succinctly, is the objective character of the kind of action to which a verb refers. Recent studies have shown that Aktionsart is not directly related to verbal tense in and of itself, but is instead a function of context and lexis4. A more accurate and nuanced interpretative analysis of verbal tense-forms will result in subtler exegetical distinctions on the level of stylistic emphasis. Several assumptions attend this project. First, verbal aspect is a subjec- tive category that can be manipulated by the speaker for effect5. Second, a change in form perforce produces a change in meaning. This essay will confront situations where the same “real-world” referent of an expression can be expressed in different formal realizations. This then becomes a stylistic question, which is to say it is left to the author’s discretion. To 4 See Decker, Temporal Deixis, 26-28, for a thorough discussion on Aktionsart and its literature. 5 The grammatical category of verbal aspect is not bound by the actual, “real-world” makeup of the event that it articulates, but rather it is malleable and subject to the speaker’s desired presentation of the event, though it may be more accurate to state this in reverse order. That is to say, a speaker, due to his choice of how he subjectively wishes to portray an action, proceeds through a system of choices (the grammatical rules of the language’s verbal system), applying the set of data he possesses concerning the event and the discourse circumstances of its articulation, until he comes to a decision to employ one aspect over the others. By no means does this imply a conscious knowledge of the system on the part of the speaker; rather, it means that the speaker would posses in his language skill-set a sense of the appropriateness of an aspect choice given the large body of information composing the environment of his speech act. Thus, it is apparent that a careful use of discourse analysis, taking into account all the factors that surround any given verb of the text, is needed in order to make sense of the reason for the choice and, accordingly, make sense of the verb’s pragmatics. On this subject, I rely on the extensive work done by several classical and New Testa- ment scholars, most notably E. Bakker, “Introduction” and “Verbal Aspect and Mimetic Description in Thucydides”, Grammar as Interpretation: Greek Literature in its Linguistic Contexts. (ed. E. Bakker) (Leiden 1997) 1-6, 7-54; C.M.J. Sicking, “Aspect Choice: Time Reference or Discourse Function?”, in C.M.J. Sicking and P. Stork (eds.), Two Studies in the Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek (Leiden 1996) 1-118; K.L. McKay, A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek: An Aspectual Approach (New York 1994); B.M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford 1990); S.E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood (New York 1989) – Idioms of the Greek New Testament (Sheffield 1992) – “In Defense of Verbal Aspect”, in D.A. Carson and S.E. Porter (eds.), Biblical Greek Linguistics: Open Questions in Cur- rent Research (Sheffield 1993) 26-45; and S.E. Porter – M.B. O’Donnell, “The Greek Verbal Network Viewed from a Probabilistic Standpoint: An Exercise in Hallidayan Linguistics”, FilNeot 14 (2001) 3-41.