Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

106 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspecttruth conditions. The common reasoning is that in such cases, for reasons ofeconomy, a language user will prefer the simpler, that is, the non-progressive,form.Since the imperfective, unlike the progressive, does combine with stativepredicates, it is a plus for an analysis if it assigns a semantics to the imperfectivethat does add a meaning element to these predicates. This is the casefor the semantics that I proposed for the imperfective in (101a). Apart froma change in type (if P is a predicate over eventualities, IMP(P) is a predicateover times), which already ensures that IMP(P) and P are not true of the sameindividuals in the domain, the temporal relation to the topic time is a meaningelement that is absent in the bare predicate. 13 This difference between thesemantics of the imperfective and the progressive explains why the former butnot the latter combines with stative predicates. As should be clear, I don’tfollow Krifka (1989b) who considers the progressive an instance of imperfectiveaspect (cf. section 3.2.2).My claim is that grammatical aspects determine the relation between thetime of the eventuality and the topic time. As a consequence, strictly speakingin my view the progressive is not a grammatical aspect. Instead it correspondsmore to the coercion operators that I introduced to account for thehabitual interpretation of the imperfective and the ingressive and complexiveinterpretations of the aorist. Like these operators, the progressive operatoris a function from predicates of eventualities onto predicates of eventualities,the difference being that the progressive operator is morphologically realisedwhereas coercion operators, by definition, are not. 14This discussion of the difference between the progressive and the imperfectivesheds new light on the fact that there are no aspectually neutral forms inAncient Greek as there are in English. In Greek one has to choose betweenimperfective and aoristic forms. This is explained in the present account bymaximal with respect toPeis e ′ ; if it is maximal and if we assume that maximal eventualitiesin the extension of a stative predicate have proper parts, which seems a reasonable thing todo, there is a different eventuality e ′ , of which PROG(P) holds).13 In connection to note 12: the main difference between the conditions t TT ⊂· τ(e) (fromimperfective aspect) ande ⊏ e ′ (from the progressive) is thatt TT in the former is an anaphorwhereas e in the latter is existentially quantified over. For this reason the step from P toPROG(P) holds even with the proper part instead of the part relation (note 12), but this stepis not possible for imperfective aspect since the topic time is fixed rather than flexible.14 Now that the difference between the progressive and the imperfective is explained byputting the notion of topic time in the semantics of the imperfective, but not in that of theprogressive, one might wonder about the role of topic times in the English tense and aspectsystem. It seems implausible that topic times play a role in languages with a perfectiveimperfectivedistinction, but not in languages like English. I think that the topic time playsa role in the interpretation of English sentences too, but that the relation between topictime and time of the eventuality is not morphologically expressed (by grammatical aspect).This is a topic for further research.