Aspect and Prominence in the Synoptic Accounts of Jesus' Entry into Jerusalem 167 the depiction of attendant circumstances”21 of the main events, which is an inherent part of the dictionary definition of background. A key feature of the approach of both Porter and Longacre to the prominence of different tense-forms is that they equate a particular degree of prominence with individual tense-forms such as the imperfect. This is at variance with the position of linguists such as Hopper22, Foley and van Valin23 and many others24 who instead perceive “an inherent correlation between perfective versus imperfective aspect and foreground versus background”25. Such a position allows us to concur with Porter that many imperfects in Mark’s Gospel give prominence to the event concerned, without requiring that every event described with the imperfect in Mark be prominent. Equally, such a position allows us to concur with Longacre and other linguists that, cross-linguistically, imperfectives in narratives typically encode information of a background nature, without requiring that every event described with the imperfect in Luke-Acts (say) be of a background nature26. If the relation between a specific tense-form and a particular degree of prominence is not a one-to-one equation but a correlation, how are we to know when the imperfect does convey prominence and when it does not? The next section seeks to answer that question. E) Marked forms and added implicatures In his article on the English progressive (“be + V-ing”), Zegarač argues for the need to distinguish between the “meaning” of the construction and the different “overtones” that arise when it is used in certain contexts, such as “mild reproof”, “insincerity” or “temporariness”27. Applying this distinction to the imperfect in Greek, the “meaning” of the imperfect is 21 S. Wallace, “Figure and Ground: The Interrelationships of Linguistic Categories”, in P. Hopper (ed.), Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics (Amsterdam 1982) 208. 22 P.J. Hopper, “Aspect and foregrounding in discourse”, in T. Givón (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 12: Discourse and Syntax (New York 1979) 215-16. 23 W.A. Foley and R. D. Van Valin, Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar (Cam- bridge 1984) 373, 397. 24 See Fanning Contribution 11 footnote 50. 25 Levinsohn Self-Instruction §5.3.2. 26 For discussion of this point, see Levinsohn Self-Instruction §§5.3.1-2. See Fanning Contribution 15 on the need to recognise both a backgrounding role for the imperfect and a “frontgrounding” one. 27 V. Zegarač, “Relevance theory and the meaning of the English progressive”, Univer- sity College London Working Papers in Linguistics 1 (1989) 20, 22.