Actions and Attitudes: Understanding Greek (and Latin) Verbal Paradigms

Recent linguistic research into how languages express situation-types, speaker's point of view, and transitivity affects how we should understand and teach the aspectual distinctions of Greek. I present here some ways in which to teach about the distinctions between the imperfect, aorist, and perfect; the thematic second aorist; and the interplay between voice and aspect, the latter including some comparanda from Spanish, a language many of our students have already studied, and English-speakers' use of the so-called "get-passive."