Aspect, Aktionsart, and Abduction: Future Tense in the New Testament 139 in essence is what others generally consider as Aktionsart52 According to Olsen, aspectual meaning is related to the understanding of the “internal temporal constituency” of an action. While grammatical aspect expresses a view of the internal temporal constituency of an action, lexical aspect expresses the nature of the internal temporal constituency of the action through Vendler’s taxonomy on temporal properties of the verbs53. Grammatical aspect is explained in terms of how an action related to the event time (ET) and the reference time (RT)54. Likewise, tense is represented by the relationship between the RT to a deictic center55. Olsen argues for a compositional aspectual interpretation, i.e. full aspectual meaning derives from both “the various constituents that encode lexical aspect (verbs, their arguments, temporal adverbials, etc.),” and the “grammatical aspect morphemes”56. The novel contribution of Olsen to the discussion of aspect is the principle of cancelability. As mentioned above, Olsen’s aspect model is evaluated in terms of a privative opposition. Lexical aspect is represented by three features: dynamicity, durativity, and telicity whereas grammatical aspect is marked by imperfective or perfective aspect. She argues that in a privative analysis of lexical aspect, only the positive member (those marked with the features) has a consistent, uncancelable semantic meaning, whereas verbs not marked may be interpreted as with or without the features depending on other lexical constituents and the pragmatic context57. Thus, meaning that comes from marked categories may not be canceled by contextual factors; unspecified features may be marked and unmarked by contextual elements (implicature). The following figure summarizes Olsen’s model: 52 In her own word: “I label the internal temporal constituency lexical aspect, it has also been known as situation aspect, inherent aspect, Aktionsart (German for ‘type of action’), actionality, aspectual class, verb class, and predicate class”. Olsen, Lexical and Grammati- cal Aspect, 8-11. 53 Olsen, Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, 8-13. See also Fanning, Verbal Aspect, 126- 96. 54 If the action is viewed from the perspective of the ET, it is imperfective. If the per- spective is from the coda of the event time, it is perfective. See Decker, Temporal Deixis, 23 and the detail analysis in Olsen, Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, 64-73. 55 The deitic center (C) is the time of speech, which is determined by pragmatic implica- ture. C is the reference point in determining time. If RT is prior to C then it is past tense, if RT is located at C, then present, if RT after C, then future. Decker, Temporal Deixis, 23 and Olsen, Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, 117-9. 56 Olsen, Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, 14. 57 Whether the same can be said of grammatical aspect is not obvious in her work. She argues that there are some languages where imperfective aspect is semantic but perfective aspect is cancelable pragmatic implicatures but did not give example on how it is possible in Greek. Olsen, Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, 20, 31.