Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

5.3 A semantic tension between aoristic aspect and present tense 125the tragic aorist posed above. He does not relate performativity to the meaningof aoristic aspect. In fact, he presents his analysis as opposed to analyses thattry to explain the tragic aorist in terms of aspect. In the analysis of the tragicaorist that I propose below I will follow Lloyd’s idea that the tragic aoristconcerns the use of the aorist that we find in performatives, but I will fill thegap in his account by showing that the aorist is the aspect to be expected withperformatives. In this way, my analysis meets the second requirement.Rijksbaron (2002) by and large follows Lloyd’s account in the latest editionof his book, but, in contrast to Lloyd, he does relate this use to the basic valueof completion that he assigns to the aorist. I will show that in order to givea full-fledged account of the phenomenon, we need the semantics of tense andaspect proposed in section 4.3.In what follows, I will present a revised view on the tragic aorist. Theessential ingredient in this analysis is the lack of a form for aoristic aspectand present tense in Ancient Greek. I first argue that this lack is due to atension between the semantic values of the two. Then, I show that this missingform would be the optimal form for performatives. To illustrate the specialaspectual behaviour of performatives I examine which verb forms are used inperformatives across languages. Finally, I will present the actual proposal.5.3 A semantic tension between aoristic aspectand present tenseWhy does Ancient Greek not have a form for aoristic aspect and present tense?The answer to this question will be an important ingredient of my explanationand interpretation of the tragic aorist. The short answer is that the possibilitiesof using a form for the combination of aoristic aspect and present tense arevery restricted for semantic reasons. Recall from chapter 4 (4.3) that aoristicaspect indicates that the eventuality time is (improperly) included in the topictime, and present tense that the topic time is the utterance time. From thisit follows that with the combination aoristic aspect and present tense, theeventuality time is (improperly) included in the utterance time. In other words,a clause with an aoristic present tense verb would only be true if the wholeeventuality described would occur within the utterance time (including theoption that the time of the eventuality coincides with the utterance time).This, however, is rarely the case. The exceptionality becomes even clearer ifthe utterance time is conceived of as punctual, as is often assumed (see, forexample, Paslawska and von Stechow 2003:322 and Kamp and Reyle 1993:539,514). Then proper inclusion in the utterance time is impossible, the onlyoption left being coincidence of eventuality time and utterance time, and forthis the eventuality time must be (conceived of as) punctual itself, too. Such