Narrative Structure and Verbal Aspect Choice in Luke 5 think, however, that stylistic difference does not correspond with a dif- ference in meaning betrays, as Egbert Bakker has said, a “referential bias” in hermeneutics as it is practiced. Meaning –to paraphrase Bakker– is more than to “what” the words of a statement refer: “how” the statement is made contains pragmatic information that can shape our interpreta- tion6. Third, in a similar fashion to the second assumption, I assume that there are discernable grounds for the choice of one aspect over the other, or, stated another way, that there is a meaningful semantic difference between the forms that cannot be explained by resorting to the notion of variety of expression for the same idea. The abundant presence of both aspects, throughout Luke-Acts7, attests to the need for the use of both complementing one another; otherwise in the course of the normal de- velopment of the language, the tense would have fallen into obsolescence and been relegated to a few archaisms, just as the optative mood had by the first century C.E8. I. A Historiographical Model Egbert Bakker has shown in his work an effective way to interpret the pragmatics of the subjective and fluid grammatical category of verbal aspect. Bakker demonstrates how two of the customary ways of interpreting verbal aspect –the durative/punctual opposition and the foreground/background opposition– fail to explain many of their uses9. Bakker proposes instead a paradigm derived from the theories of linguist 6 “Introduction”, 1. Saussure speaks to this very point when he draws a distinction between signification (“signification”) and valeur (“value”). Both of these categories have semantic import for the practice of hermeneutics. The former is the aspect of language by which the linguistic sign indicates its “real-world” referent. The latter is that by which a word acquires meaning in relation to the rest of the language system. Two different words may have the same signification, that is, they may refer to the same object. Such words we call synonyms. These same two words, however, will differ in the latter category of valeur. This principle holds true in verbal systems as well. In fact, Saussure offers verbal aspect as an example of the differing valeur between the Slavic languages’ verbal systems and the French’s (F. de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Générale, eds. C. Bally – A. Sechehaye – A. Riedlinger – T. de Mauro) [Paris 1972] 161-62). 7 There are 4148 perfective forms in Luke-Acts and 1741 imperfective, excluding finite indicative present forms. These include 2106 finite indicative aorists and 773 imperfects. Thus there is a significant and steadfast minority of imperfects (more than a quarter) in finite, normally past-referring situations. I have used the software BibleWorks 5.0 through- out my analysis for the comparative word-form counts. 8 In Luke-Acts there are only 28 instances of the mood. 9 In my analysis below of chapter four of Luke’s gospel, I too shall show how these customary ways fail to account for all of the Lukan usages of verbal aspect.