161 Aspect and Prominence in the Synoptic Accounts of Jesus' Entry into Jerusalem1 STEPHEN H. LEVINSOHN Porter’s analysis of the prominence conveyed by the aorist, imperfect and present is contrasted with Longacre’s claims about the same tense- forms. Both are wrong in equating respectively “foreground” (Porter) and “background” (Longacre) with the imperfect. Relevance Theory claims that non-default forms may result in a variety of cognitive effects. This explains why imperfectives correlate with background, yet sometimes have foregrounding effects. Additional non-default forms and structures can also be accommodated, such as inchoative aorist ἤρξαντο and the combination of aorist ἐγένετο and a temporal expression. Finally, a non-default form or structure may give prominence not to the event concerned, but to the following event(s). Keywords: Tense-form, prominence, backgrounding, cognitive effects. A) The problem Most narratives in the Gospels employ more than one “tense-form”2. If we concentrate on the narrative events themselves, we usually find that most of them are presented with the aorist, while others are encoded with the imperfect, the historical present (HP) and, occasionally, the perfect and pluperfect. Stanley E. Porter and Robert E. Longacre have both made proposals about the effect of using these different tense-forms.3 They agree that “the aorist tense-form characterizes the mainline or 1 A shorter form of this paper was presented at the International Conference of the Society of Biblical Literature held in Tartu, Estonia in July 2010. 2 C.R. Campbell, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek (Grand Rapids, MI 2008) 24. 3 For a useful introduction to and critique of Porter’s approach to the tense forms of Biblical Greek, see Barnard, Jody A., “Is Verbal Aspect a Prominence Indicator? An Evaluation of Stanley E. Porter’s Proposal with Special Reference to the Gospel of Luke”, Filología Neotestamentaria XIX, 37-38 (2006), 3-29. For a summary of Longacre’s “sto- ryline scheme” with its verb ranking system in terms of “bands”, see J.-M. Heimerdinger, Topic, Focus and Foreground in Ancient Hebrew Narratives (Sheffield 1999) 57-58. Filología Neotestamentaria - Vol. XXIII - 2010, pp. 161-174 Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad de Córdoba (España)