Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

128 Chapter 5. Aspect and performativity: the tragic aorist5.5 Performatives across languagesLet’s see which tense-aspect combination is chosen for performatives crosslinguistically,starting with English. Although this language does not have adistinction between perfective (=aoristic) and imperfective aspect, we can stillsee that performatives are special aspectually. We have already seen in section3.3.1 that non-stative predicates in the simple (=non-progressive) present tensedo not receive a literal interpretation, but are interpreted habitually. (151),for example, is interpreted as describing a habit rather than a single runningeventuality.(151) Lizet runs the Brabant half-marathon.There exist a few exceptions to this generalization, however. One of them is theclass of performatives. The sentences in (150) have non-stative predicates inthe simple present tense, but are nevertheless naturally interpreted as referringto a single eventuality. I don’t aim to explain this here, but I only want topoint at the exceptional status performatives have in English. Let’s now lookat performatives in languages that do have a distinction between perfectiveand imperfective aspect.Biblical Hebrew is an interesting language with regard to the relation betweenaspect and performatives, since aspect is grammaticalised (it has a distinctionbetween perfective and imperfective aspect, traditionally called perfectand imperfect, respectively), but tense is not (see, for example, Koschmieder1929:58-71). 4 The absence of tense in Hebrew makes it possible to investigatewhich aspect a language uses for performatives if there is no tense interference.And indeed, as we might expect, Hebrew uses perfective aspect (Koschmieder1930:354, Koschmieder 1945:22): 5(152) bēraktî ’ōtôbless.pfv.1sg he.acc“I (hereby) bless him” Biblical HebrewSlovene is a language with grammatical tense and aspect. It has a binarytense system: a form for past and a form for non-past tense. The combinationof non-past tense and perfective aspect usually gets a future interpretation, butit is also the form most often used in performatives. See (153) (from Greenberg2006):4 But see Joosten (2002), for example, for a different view on the verb forms in BiblicalHebrew.5 The transliteration is Rogland’s (2001:244).