Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

2 Chapter 1. Introductiongroundbreaking work of Frege (1879, 1892, 1918-1919) and Montague (1970,1973) is to derive the meaning of a compound expression in a systematic wayfrom the meanings of its components. Over the last decades, due in particularto the work of Kamp (1981, 1993), the attention shifted to the analysis of largerstretches of discourse. My aim in this thesis is to add to this enterprise byexploring the semantic contribution of aspect to the meaning of sentences as awhole and and its functioning in larger discourses. To achieve this, I approachthe subject from the perspective of formal semantics. In this branch of semantics,meaning is captured in terms of truth conditions, following the adageknowing the meaning of a sentence is knowing when it is true. These truthconditions are represented in a formal language which has an exact modeltheoretictruth definition. This is to ensure that the interpretation of onenatural language sentence is not explained by means of another, which in turnneeds to be explained, thus leading to an infinite regression. For example, todescribe the difference in meaning between (1a) and (1b), which is a differencein tense, I used quite a number of present tense verb forms (states, is, locates).The definiendum occurs a number of times in the definiens! Formal-semanticapproaches steer clear of this problem by a translation into a formal languagewith an exact model-theoretic interpretation. Examples of such formal systemsare first-order predicate logic, typed lambda calculus, and Discourse RepresentationTheory (DRT). Following Russell, these formal representations of truthconditions are called logical forms. In the last few decades the methods offormal semantics have been applied to a wide range of phenomena in naturallanguage semantics. This has resulted in highly sophisticated treatments ofvarious topics, including tense and aspect.Traditionally, research in formal semantics has concentrated on English.However, it isn’t the meaning of aspect in English that is central to this thesis,but that in Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek is well known for its literaryheritage, but more importantly for our purposes, it presents us a very richaspect system. Following Comrie’s definition, the language possesses threetenses: a present, a past, and a future tense. In addition to these tenses, ithas three grammatical aspects: aoristic, imperfective, and perfect aspect. Inthis respect, it resembles the French system in size. However, Ancient Greekgoes further than French, by extending its aspectual oppositions beyond theindicative forms. We find specialised aspectual forms not only in the indicative,but also in the subjunctive, optative, and imperative modes, as well asin the non-finite forms (infinitive and participle). Apart from its distribution,the Ancient Greek system is transparant as it shows a systematic coding oftense and aspect through the employment of separate morphemes. This meansthat tense and aspect are well distinguished morphologically. The morphemesact as a permanent reminder that the two categories should also be clearlydistinguished in the semantic analysis. In sum, given its analytic morphol-