Aspect, Aktionsart, and Abduction: Future Tense in the New Testament 155 Campbell’s own theory, that his argument of a perfective Future is made to fit this rather peculiar tense-form (the Future) to “the accepted two aspect system”140, even to a point of conflating aspect and Aktionsart. In fact, one can argue that Porter’s treatment shows the exact opposite of being theory-driven. One would think that if one has to strictly follow Porter’s system and include all tense-forms, instead of calling the Future as not fully aspectual, one would have to impose an opposition to the Future to create a more balanced system. 3.5 Semantic Feature of the Future As mentioned above, due to its rather odd formal paradigm, any attempt to place the Future within established categories, whether treating it strictly as a tense, a non-Indicative Mood, or an aspect, will confront countless qualifications and exceptions. In Porter’s verbal network, the Future is under the aspectuality system since it has tense- related morphological features. It is “compatible with environments where full aspectual choice is made, but it does not grammaticalize such choice itself”141. It has been noted that the Future is used parallel to or in place of the non-Indicative Moods, this apparent functional overlapping provides the direction of the discussion of semantic features of the Future. The Future thus expresses “a volition, a desire, an aim toward a goal, a prediction, an intention, an expectation”142. Porter argues that the Future grammaticalizes [+expectation]. He summarizes it as: The Future is a unique form in Greek, similar both to the aspects and to the attitudes, but fully neither, and realizing not a temporal conception but a marked and emphatic expectation toward a process143. As one can easily notice, Porter’s [+expectation] is very similar to McKay’s proposal of intention. The main distinction is that Porter does not regard the Future as grammaticalizing time, but only the semantic feature of expectation. This is where his treatment attracts most heated criticisms. 140 Campbell, Verbal Aspect, 139, n21. 141 Porter, Verbal Aspect, 413. 142 Porter states that this is where most of the grammarians would agree on. Porter, Verbal Aspect, 414. 143 Porter, Verbal Aspect, 414.