Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

4.9 The conative and likelihood interpretations 107the fact that imperfective and aoristic aspect make a semantic contributionwith any predicate. With aspectually neutral forms the eventuality would notbe related to the topic time. The progressive, on the other hand, does notdetermine the relation to the topic time. Given its semantics in (132) it doesnot make a semantic contribution with stative predicates and as a result issuperfluous.One may raise the following objection to this explanation of why the imperfective,in contrast to the progressive, does combine with stative predicates:the reason that the imperfective does combine with stative predicates is that inGreek, in contrast to English, there are no aspectually neutral forms that couldbe chosen instead. Note, however, that my explanation goes further as it explainswhy there are no aspectually neutral forms in Ancient Greek, the reasonbeing that the imperfective and aorist always make a semantic contribution.4.9 The conative and likelihood interpretationsAfter the discussion of the interaction between imperfective aspect and stativepredicates in the previous section, let’s now turn to the interaction withbounded predicates. Imperfective aspect indicates that an eventuality describedby the predicate is going on at the time about which we speak, thetopic time. Intuitively, this semantics can handle the conative interpretationof imperfective aspect, the use of imperfective aspect for eventualities that donot proceed further than an attempt (see section 2.1), which is restricted tobounded predicates. The intuitive explanation of this use is as follows: Sinceone restricts one’s claim to a specific time and says about that time that aneventuality is going on, no claim is made that the eventuality will ever becompleted. For stative predicates this is not relevant, given that a part of aneventuality that makes a stative predicate true also makes the predicate true(cf. (100)). So even if the eventuality is not completed, there is still an eventualityto which the predicate applies. To a high degree, the same holds forunbounded non-stative predicates, due to their partial divisivity (cf. (99) and(100)). 15 But for bounded predicates (cf. (99)), it is not the case that if thereis an eventuality of the relevant kind in progress there is also an eventuality towhich the predicate applies. To illustrate this, compare the French examplesin (133) and (134):(133) a. Max c o u r a i t.Max run.pst.IPFV.3sg“Max was running”15 That it is a high degree can be concluded from the fact that (133a) entails (133b): anarbitrary part of running still counts as running.