Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

4.8 Imperfectivity versus progressivity 105giving the predicate a habitual reinterpretation.In a dynamic framework, like DRT, however, there is no need for meaningpostulates that represent our knowledge concerning the duration of eventualitiesin order to get a contradiction. Since a context update is always anintersection with the background knowledge, which also contains knowledgeabout the typical duration of eventualities, we automatically end up withoutmodels if the interpretation of the utterance is in conflict with the duration ofeventualities.After this discussion of the habitual interpretation, we are left with theconative and likelihood interpretation of imperfective aspect. Before discussingthese, however, I first consider the imperfective with stative predicates.4.8 Imperfectivity versus progressivityIn this section I will discuss a remarkable difference between the processualinterpretation of imperfective aspect and the progressive in English: in contrastto the latter, the former combines happily with stative predicates (see p. 12).The unwillingness of the English progressive to combine with stative predicatesis commonly explained by arguing that the progressive of a stative predicatedoes not mean more than the predicate itself (one of the first explanationsalong these lines is found in Taylor 1977:206). This is indeed the case if oneassigns Krifka’s PROG (= (66)), given in its dynamic form in (132), to theprogressive:(132) PROG = λPλe[e ′e ⊑ e ′ ⊕P(e ′ )]PROG maps predicates of eventualities onto predicates of eventualities. 11 Itfollows from this semantics of the progressive in combination with the definitionof stativity in (100) that a sentence with a stative predicate in the simple formand the same sentence with the predicate in the progressive form have thesame truth conditions: for all stative predicates P, for all eventualities e, (i)if PROG(P) applies to e, P applies to it as well, and conversely, (ii) if P appliesto e, PROG(P) applies to it as well. 12 Thus, the two sentences have the same11 Existential quantification over the eventuality variable e is introduced later in the composition,as in de Swart’s (1998) account. In this respect this semantics of the progressivedeviates from (101a), the semantics I propose for the imperfective.12 The truth conditions are also the same if the semantics of the progressive has a properpart rather than a part relation, as we find for example in Egg (2005), see (96). Although(ii) does not hold in that case (not always if an eventuality e is in the extension of a stativepredicateP, it is also in the extension ofPROG(P), for e may be maximal with respect toP(formaximality, see section 4.5)), it is still the case that if an eventuality e is in the extension of astative predicate P there is an eventuality e ′ that is in the extension ofPROG(P) (for if e is not