Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

96 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspectwith both interpretations. On the basis of the principle that an interpreterchooses the strongest interpretation available, we may at first prefer a complexiveinterpretation. It is only after interpreting the continuation (118) (withthe present tense form δακρει̋ dakrueis) that we know that Xerxes is stillcrying at the moment of Artabanus’ speech and hence that a complexive interpretationis not available, for it would state that the whole (=maximal) cryingeventuality is included in a topic time before the time of Artabanus’ speechand hence that the crying is finished by that time. 8The need to wait for more information before a choice from several coercionoperators can be made is quite common. Consider (119), an example ofcoercion outside the realm of aspect:(119) #John began a novel.Sentences like (119) are discussed extensively by Pustejovsky (1991, 1993,1995). He claims that the verb begin denotes a relation between individuals andactivities (properties of individuals). In (119), however, the second argumentof begin is an NP and does not denote an activity. This mismatch is solvedby mapping the NP semantics to a novel-related activity. On Pustejovsky’saccount the information what are the permissible novel-related activities isprovided by the semantic entry of the word novel. The entry contains amongother things information about the origin of novels (someone writes them) andthe purpose of novels (someone reads them). Given these two novel-relatedactivities the mismatch in (119) can be resolved in two ways: (119) can beread as that John began to read a novel and that he began to write a novel.Knowing nothing about John, both are optional. If, however, the story continueswith (120), we know that the novel-related activity John is involved inis one of writing.(120) He writes a page a day.Sometimes it isn’t even clear from the sentence itself that coercion isneeded. To see this, let’s first consider the famous example (121) from Nunberg(1979):(121) The ham sandwich is sitting at table 20.It is clear that the ham sandwich in (121) cannot refer to the sandwich itself,since sandwiches don’t sit at tables. Rather the expression is reinterpreted asreferring to the person who ordered a ham sandwich. But let’s now have alook at (122) (from Egg 2005:122):8 Here I assume that with a sequence of aorists, the topic time of the eventuality at handfollows upon the topic time of the last mentioned eventuality. I will return to this in chapter6, which is devoted to the way the topic time of a sentence is determined in a discourse.