The semantics of the later Koine Greek perfect have been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. For the immediately post-Classical language Haug (2004) has suggested that the perfect combines resultant state and XN semantics, unifiable under the framework of event realisation (Bohnemeyer & Swift 2004). The present article presents a modified unitary semantic in terms of participant property (Smith 1997), and assesses its validity with reference to the translation of the perfect indicative active into Gothic. It is found that, while non-state verbs are translated only with past-tense forms in Gothic, contrary to traditional and even many modern views of the Greek perfect, the perfect of both pure state and change-of-state verbs are compatible with both past and non-past tense readings. The fact that this is the case regardless of the diachronic pedigree of the perfect forms concerned is taken as evidence consistent with the existence of the proposed unitary semantic for the Greek perfect in the New Testament in the eyes of the Gothic translator.

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This review treats both Campbell’s book Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek specifically as well as his view of verbal aspect in Greek more generally. In the assessment of the latter, two points receive particular attention: (a) his desire to replace tense with spatial proximity/remoteness as the underlying semantic category encoded by the indicative, and (b) his identification of the perfect with imperfective aspect.

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It takes only a passing familiarity with Classical Greek, as well as many other old Indo-European languages to be aware of the rule that certain small words, that is, 'particles' such as μέν and δέ, are wont to come 'second' in their clause. This phenomenon has become known as 'Wackernagel's law'. However, the specification of exactly what it means to be 'second' is, on closer inspection, harder than one might think to establish (see e.g. Clackson Introduction 2007 pp. 168f.). This is part of the much broader problem of accurately describing surface word order in Greek, which, from antiquity to the present has been notorious for its 'freedom'. Coming in a line of recent monographs focusing on 1 This review was completed as part of an ongoing programme of research as part of the CREWS project (Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758).