168 Stephen H. Levinsohn the portrayal of an event as “not completed” at the point of reference28. The “overtones” that arise vary with the context, and include both backgrounding and foregrounding. Zegarač also deals with the issue of “markedness” and distinguishes between contexts in which a particular tense-form is the default or “more relevant” way of portraying an event29 and “marked” usages of the tense- form. Applying this distinction to the Greek imperfect, there will be many occasions when the imperfect is the most relevant way of portraying an event, simply because the desire of the author is to indicate, as in Mark 10,52c (sec. B), that Bartimaeus not only began to follow Jesus, but was continuing to do so. Similarly, in Luke 2,41, the imperfect is the most relevant way of portraying Jesus’ parents’ custom of going to Jerusalem each year for the Passover, simply because the desire of the author is to indicate that this custom was ongoing when Jesus became twelve years’ old. If the aorist is the most relevant way of portraying an event, but an author chooses to use the imperfect instead, then “he must have intended to convey special contextual effects”30. By choosing a more marked form, “the communicator makes the utterance more costly to process... [and] this would entail that she intended to convey additional implicatures to compensate for the increase in processing effort”31. For example, in Mark 11,5 (“Some of those standing there were saying [ἔλεγον] to them, ‘What are you doing, untying that colt?’ ”; sec. B), the imperfect does not appear to be the most relevant way of portraying the act of speaking, as it does not seem to be ongoing at the point of reference. Consequently, the reader looks for “additional implicatures to compensate for the increase in processing effort”32. We now examine how these principles of Relevance Theory work out in practice. When an imperfect occurs early in a narrative unit and seems to be the most relevant way of portraying the event concerned because it is readily perceived as ongoing or not completed at the point of reference, then overtones of backgrounding can probably be perceived, simply because of the cross-linguistic correlation between imperfectives and background 28 Levinsohn Self-Instruction §5.3.2. 29 Zegarač English progressive 29. In the rest of this article, I replace “more relevant” with “most relevant”. 30 E.-A. Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Oxford 1991) 103. 31 Gutt Translation and Relevance 41. See also D. Sperber and D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford 1995) 220. 32 Gutt Translation and Relevance 41.