Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

132 Chapter 5. Aspect and performativity: the tragic aorist“By Athena Nike ..., your father is not a mortal, but the one whowho brought you up, lord Loxias.” E. Ion 1528-31That Creusa performs an oath in (157) is clear from the swearing particle µma.If Lloyd is right and the function of the tragic aorist is ‘to distance thespeaker from the full force of the present tense performative’, we expect thisdistancing effect not to be restricted to explicit performatives. The force ofimplicit performatives may be in need of being weakened, too. But, contraryto what we expect on Lloyd’s account, the aorist is not used as a distancingdevice with such performatives. On my account, however, this is exactly whatwe expect: a characteristic of explicit performatives is the coincidence of thetime of the eventuality described by the finite verb and the utterance time,which demands aoristic aspect. Implicit performatives don’t have this feature,so there is no reason to expect aoristic aspect there.An objection to the account proposed here may be that it claims that thetragic aorist should not be interpreted as referring to the past, even thoughmorphologically it is a past tense form. By way of an answer, I only point at thefact that the tragic aorist is not an anomaly in this respect, that is, it is not theonly use of the aorist indicative that is morphologically, but not semanticallya past tense. The same thing is observed with the so-called gnomic or genericaorist, the use of the aorist indicative in general truths, proverbs and similes(see section 2.4.4). An indication that this latter use of the aorist is not apast tense semantically, comes from the mode of the subclauses: verbs in thesubclauses modifying the main clause are in the subjunctive – as when themain clause is in the present tense – rather than the optative – as in the caseof the common (past) aorist indicative (Rijksbaron 2002:31).5.7 ConclusionIn this chapter I have shown that the tragic aorist is the use of the aorist thatwe find in performatives. Furthermore, I have demonstrated on the basis of thesemantics of tense and aspect developed in chapter 4 that the optimal form forperformatives would be the combination of present tense and aoristic aspect,since eventualtity time and utterance time coincide. This form, however, doesnot exist in Ancient Greek. In the absence of the optimal form, two suboptimalforms are equally good: the form for present tense and imperfective aspect andthe form for past tense and aoristic aspect. The latter is what is traditionallycalled the tragic aorist. This analysis of the tragic aorist satisfies all fourcriteria formulated in section 5.1. Once the tragic use had been unveiled as theuse of the aorist in performatives, the semantics of tense and aspect developedin chapter 4 did the rest.