29 Is Verbal Aspect a Prominence Indicator? tense or sometimes the perfect tense, which is entirely consistent with Porter’s proposal. It was also observed, however, that some of these so called foreground and frontground tenses occur in background contexts. Furthermore, it became evident that Porter’s system does not adequately account for certain restrictions upon aspectual choice, which reduces the likelihood that Luke was invariably free to choose verbal aspect. Not only can prominent points and climactic junctures be discerned by the careful reader without the aid of verbal aspect, but it is evident that every aspect occurs in every plane of discourse. For Luke, the aorist, the present and the perfect tenses were legitimate tenses to place in back- ground, foreground and frontground narration. This not only undermines Porter’s proposal but also alternative models of aspectual prominence such as that advocated by Fanning and others111. Indeed, the fact that Porter’s hypothesis has achieved a measure of acceptance demonstrates the inadequacy of the more traditional models. We began by asking “is verbal aspect a prominence indicator?” and, although the texts considered in this study are too small a sample to generalize, they offer little or no reason for answering “yes” to this question. Although Porter’s model of aspectual prominence sometimes coheres with emphatic or climactic junctures, this might owe more to coincidence than to an intentional marking of prominence. It is possible, if not probable, that verbal aspect communicates aspect in these instan- ces and has nothing to do with the indication of prominence. Further research would be required to substantiate this claim, of course, but with regard to the data evaluated in this study it makes just as much sense as Porter’s proposal. It would also explain why two virtually opposite, though equally credible, branches of scholarship have emerged on this issue. Although disagreement is often the nature of scholarship, in this instance the disagreement may be due to category misplacement. Jody A. BARNARD London School of Theology Green Lane, Northwood Middlesex, HA6 2UW UNITED KINGDOM In contrast to Fanning et al. S.J.J. Hwang has disputed the “widely accepted” belief 111 that the imperfective aspect signals background information. He has observed that it is often employed simply to convey simultaneous action with another foregrounded event (see “Foreground Information in Narrative”, Southwest Journal of Linguistics 9.2 [1990] 78-82).