6 Alexander C. Loney Wallace Chafe10. His paradigm identifies two modes of discourse: the “discourse of the knower”, which is chiefly concerned with the relation of information as ostensible “facts” and the “discourse of the observer”, which affects a “pretense of observation”, whereby the reader is given an account presented as though it were being witnessed by an observer on the spot. Each of these modes possesses its own rules of usage for the aorist and imperfect tenses. Before describing these modes of discourse in more detail, it is fitting first to consider the theoretical underpinnings of these two tenses, as formulated by Bakker. The imperfect, Bakker convincingly argues, effects a displacement of the narrative from the speaker’s present situation to the speaker’s past, from what is “near” with respect to the act of utterance to what is “far”. This characteristic of the imperfect tense of effecting “distance”11 coin- cides with its grammatical opposition to the aorist, which, conversely, effects “immediacy”. Thus the imperfect, inasmuch as it signifies “dis- tance” from the moment of speaking, “seems to be incompatible with signs pertaining to the speaker’s present situation”. According to Bakker, the imperfect is categorically a “past” tense12. 10 See W.L. Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (Chicago – London 1994). 11 The term “distance” here is not to be taken too literally; rather, it is somewhat akin to point of view, as when Bakker writes that the “modal” difference between the imperfect and aorist has to do with the relevance of an action “to a given vantage point” (“Verbal Aspect”, 26). Thus, the aspectual distinction between the imperfect tense (imperfective aspect) and the aorist tense (perfective aspect) that results in points of view, as Bakker understands it, is roughly equivalent to the function of aspect as Porter and Fanning describe it: “…aspect is concerned with the speaker’s viewpoint…” (Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 84). It should be noted that “distance” in this usage often signifies temporal “distance”, but can also signify other kinds of linguistic “distance” (see also ns. 12 and 37 below). 12 “Verbal Aspect”, 20. Bakker seems to be suggesting that the imperfect is a “past” tense in the sense that it locates an event on the timeline in a position always antecedent to the speaker’s present. This is in keeping with traditional definitions of tense. D. Kilby, Descriptive Syntax and the English Verb (London 1984) 15, for example, writes that tense “primarily involves the time of the event or state specified by the verb relative to the moment of utterance”. B. Comrie, Tense (Cambridge 1985) 9, also, defines tense as “grammatical- ized expression of location in time”. This is to some degree contra Porter, Verbal Aspect, 209, who argues that “the [i]mperfect is no exception to the rule that the tenses in Greek are not time-based, since the [i]mperfect can be used in a number of non past-time contexts”. I agree with Porter that the imperfect can indicate events which are non-past. His best example is the protasis of contrafactual conditions, which can employ this tense in way that does not locate the event in the past. The imperfect in this instance clearly marks remoteness from the speaker’s present, that is, it signals the distance of the referent event from the speaker’s present reality and, hence, its unreality. Bakker would have been best served to limit his description of the imperfect tense here to “non-present”, rather than categorically “past”.