Aspect, Aktionsart, and Abduction: Future Tense in the New Testament 131 order to facilitate such a comparison. This study is an attempt to bring the discussion of the Future in the Greek verbal network up-to-date by summarizing the views of the major contributors, defining terms and possibly untangling the misunderstandings among various contributors8. This study starts with a brief review of the history of research in Greek verbal aspect. The major views of the debate will be identified and terms will be defined. Particular attention is given to how different proposals distinguish aspect and Aktionsart. It will then focus on how the Future tense-form is evaluated in various models. This section begins with a brief summary of the current proposals of the possible origin and development of the Greek Future tense-form. It is followed by a discussion of how various parties describe the nature of the Future, particularly their view on how it encodes aspect. A distinction is made between three kinds of logical reasoning: induction, deduction, and abduction. It is argued that the abductive approach is the preferred method for determining the aspect of the Future tense. The paper concludes with a summary of findings and suggestion for further research. 2. Verbal Aspect Theory: Definition, History and Development Discussions about the debate of Greek verbal aspect are ample9. It is thus necessary for this study neither to recount a detailed history of the Porter/Fanning debate nor to rehearse the arguments from all parties. Instead, what must to be done is a comparative summary of the development of various models, singling out the things that are relevant to the discussion of the function of the Future. But before going into the discussion of aspect in various proposals, definition of several terms is necessary. 8 It is necessary to be clear about terms that signify the form and the function of the form. Here in this paper, “tense-form” refers to the verb’s morphology whereas “tense” refers to the traditional understanding of the function of the tense form, the time of the action. This paper follows the convention of Porter of capitalizing the formal terms, e.g. Future, Present Indicative, Subjunctive, and using lower case for functional categories, e.g. perfective, future and past time, attitude, etc. Porter, Verbal Aspect, 12. 9 For example, see D.A. Carson, “An Introduction to the Porter/Fanning Debate”, Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research. (eds. S.E. PORTER – D.A. CARSON) (JSNTSS 80; Sheffield 1993) 18-25; Decker, Temporal Deixis, 5-28; S.E. Porter, “Greek Grammar and Syntax”, The Face of New Testament Studies: A Survey of Recent Research. (eds. S. MCKNIGHT – G.R. OSBORNE) (Grand Rapids, MI 2004) 89-92; Picirilli, “The Meaning of the Tenses”, 535-41; Naselli, “Introduction to Verbal Aspect”, 17-24 and Porter and Pitts, “Recent Research”, 215-22.