Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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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.
5.4 The semantics of performatives 127Greek.5.4 The semantics of performativesIn the previous section I have shown that the form for aoristic aspect andpresent tense is the expected form when the time of the eventuality and theutterance time coincide. This coincidence is rare, but we do find it with performatives.Let’s have a look again at the examples of performatives that Ipresented above:(150) a. I apologize for my behaviour.b. I swear I am not guilty.c. I name this ship the Queen Elisabeth.It is clear that in (150) the eventuality time and utterance time coincide,since the eventualities of apologizing, swearing, and naming referred to areexactly the utterances of the sentences themselves. The peculiar status ofsuch sentences had already been observed by Koschmieder (1929, 1930, 1945)long before Austin, as witnessed by the following citation (from Koschmieder1945:22):Ich war bei der Untersuchung der Funktion der sog. “Tempora” inHebräischen durch den Fall bērachtī’ōpō = “ich segne ihn hiermit”darauf aufmerksam geworden, daß es sich hierbei um einen Sonderfallhandelt, in dem nämlich das Aussprechen des Satzes nicht nurvon der Handlung spricht, sondern auch eben die betr. Handlungist.(When investigating the function of the so-called “tempora” in Hebrew,I noticed that in the case of bērachtī’ōpō = “I hereby blesshim” something special is going on, in that the utterance of thesentence not only mentions the action, but also is the action.)Koschmieder coins the phenomenon Koinzidenzfall. In line with this, Lemmon(1962) states that performative sentences are self-verifiable: by uttering a performativesentence, the speaker automatically makes it true (in this respect,Lemmon deviates from Austin who claims that performatives do not have atruth value (that is, they are neither true, nor false), as they do somethingrather than describe something).I have shown that the optimal form for performatives is the combinationof present tense and aoristic aspect, since eventuality time and utterance timecoincide. But this combination does not exist in Ancient Greek. How doesGreek get around this problem? Before I answer this question, I will firstdiscuss the form of performatives in some other languages: English, Hebrew,Slovenian, Polish, and Russian.
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Aspect in Ancient GreekA semantic a
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viNick Asher, David Beaver, the lat
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Contentsix8 Conclusions and discuss
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2 Chapter 1. Introductiongroundbrea
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4 Chapter 1. Introduction(4) µετ
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6 Chapter 1. Introductionimperfecti
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1.3 Organisation of the thesis 9In
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Chapter 2The interpretations of aor
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2.3 Additional interpretations of t
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2.5 The challenge 21scriptions of h
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24 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal sema
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3.2 The perfective-imperfective dis
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 673.3.1 Aspe
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 69bials ((88
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 71the term c
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 73in the ext
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176 Chapter 8. Conclusions and disc
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178 Appendix A: The language of Com
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192 Appendix B: Examples spelled ou
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206 Appendix C: List of abbreviatio
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208 Appendix C: List of abbreviatio
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210 References(Eds.), Cross-linguis
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212 ReferencesGrice, P. (1975). Log
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214 ReferencesLemmon, E. J. (1962).
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216 Referencesvan der Sandt, R. (19
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218 References
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220 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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222 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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