Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

126 Chapter 5. Aspect and performativity: the tragic aoristeventualities are rare, however. So the reason that Ancient Greek does nothave a form for aoristic aspect and present tense is that there is little use forit. 2 Support for this view may be found in the development of the AncientGreek tense and aspect system. It has been argued, for example by Hewsonand Bubenik (1997), that Ancient Greek originally had a binary tense systemwith distinct forms for past and non-past tense, the latter covering the meaningof the present and future tense in a ternary tense system. On this view, theform for aoristic aspect and non-past tense is what later became the form fora genuine future tense. This hypothesis explains the morphological similaritybetween the (sigmatic) aorist and (sigmatic) future. But how did this formfor aoristic aspect and non-past tense develop into a future tense? This developmentis explained neatly if we assume the tension between aoristic aspectand present tense argued for above: in principle, the form for aoristic aspectand non-past tense could be used to refer to the present time as well as to thefuture. But, as I have shown, the possibilities for using aoristic aspect to referto the present time are very restricted for semantic reasons. For this reason,the form for non-past tense and aoristic aspect was in fact almost exclusivelyused for future time reference and began to be felt as a future tense. Fromthere it developed into a genuine future tense. 3In sum, there is no form for the combination present tense and aoristicaspect because there is a tension between their semantic contributions: thereare very few situations that hold exactly at the moment of speaking. Butalthough there is little use for this combination, from a semantic perspectivethe combination is not completely impossible. In the next section I will showthat performatives represent one of the few cases where we would expect theform for aoristic aspect and present tense, the form that is missing in Ancient2 This explanation of the lack of a form for aoristic aspect and present tense hinges onthe assumption that the present tense states that the topic time is, rather than includes theutterance time. As I have mentioned in section 4.3 the former option is pursued by Kampet al. and von Stechow et al., the latter by Klein. The reason that I followed the former isexactly that this makes it easy to see why there is no form for the combination of aoristicaspect and present tense. If, on the other hand, the contribution of the present tense isthat the topic time includes the moment of utterance, this absence cannot be accounted for,at least not in a straightforward way. In fact, we would predict that the form for aoristicaspect and present tense can even be used if the eventuality time does not overlap with theutterance time at all, for we have the conditions τ(e) ⊆ t TT and n ⊆ t TT which allows thatτ(e) does not overlap with n.3 As Eystein Dahl (p.c.) has pointed out to me, Hewson and Bubenik’s (1997) hypothesisof the relationship between the (sigmatic) aorist and (sigmatic) future in Ancient Greek issomewhat controversial within the Indo-European research community, despite its advantages.Tichy (2006:307–308, 311–318), for example, assume that the Ancient Greek sigmaticfuture derives from an independent sigmatic voluntative. This, however, does not affect theabove given explanation for the lack of the form for aoristic aspect and present tense interms of a semantic tension.