5 Is Verbal Aspect a Prominence Indicator? 3. Stative aspect, grammaticalized by the perfect and pluperfect ten- ses8, conveys the action as a state of affairs, stipulating the condition of the grammatical subject. Thus, when a writer of Hellenistic Greek conceived of an action they had the choice of presenting it in one of three ways: perfective, imperfec- tive or stative. It should not be assumed, of course, that this three-way choice was available for every verb since many verbs are not conjugated in every tense form necessary for the grammatical expression of all three aspects. Porter describes such verbs as “aspectually vague” and lists εἰμί (I am), εἶμι (I go), κεῖμαι (I lie), φημί (I say), ἦμαι (I sit) and νέομαι (I go) in this category9. Therefore, these verbs shall be excluded from the present study. 1.3. Porter’s Proposal In essence Porter proposes that “verbal aspects are a means by which the points of emphasis or peaks of a discourse may be indicated”10. In his Idioms of the Greek New Testament, Porter draws attention to the work of discourse analysts who distinguish between three planes of discourse: background, foreground and frontground. He then asserts that: The aorist is the background tense, which forms the basis for the discourse11; the present is the foreground tense, which introduces significant characters or makes appropriate climactic references to concrete situationsl2; and the perfect is the frontground tense, which introduces elements in an even more discrete, defined, contoured and complex way13. action is seen as more remote than the action described by the (non-remote) present” (Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament with Reference to Tense and Mood [New York 1989] 207). Porter also employs the concept of remoteness to distinguish between the perfect and 8 pluperfect, cf. Aspect, 289. Porter, Aspect, 442-47. 9 Porter, Idioms, 302. 10 Porter suggests that the aorist “is the predominant narrative tense of Greek, in the 11 sense that it is the tense which is relied upon to carry a narrative along when no attention is being drawn to the events being spoken of” (Idioms, 35). Concerning the imperfect Porter writes “it is the narrative form used when an action 12 is selected to dwell upon . . . [it] is similar in function to the historic use of the present. Although they share the same verbal aspect, the present is used to draw even more attention to an action” (Idioms, 34; cf. Aspect, 198-208). Porter, Idioms, 23; cf. Aspect, 92-93 and his “In Defence of Verbal Aspect”, in Porter 13 and Carson (eds.), Greek Language and Linguistics, 35.