Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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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.
Chapter 6The temporal structure ofdiscourse6.1 IntroductionIn the two previous chapters I have presented an analysis of the various interpretationsof aoristic and imperfective aspect. For this I have been mainly(though not exclusively) concerned with isolated sentences. In the presentchapter I go beyond the level of the sentence and move on to the level ofdiscourse.It has often been observed that the choice of aspect affects the interpretationof the temporal relations between eventualities described in a discourse(for Ancient Greek, see, for example, Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950:297-301,Hettrich 1976, Ruijgh 1985, Ruijgh 1991, Rijksbaron 2002:11-14). In section3.2.1, we have already touched upon this phenomenon, discussing the analysisof aspect of Kamp et al. which was developed to account for this veryphenomenon.In the account to be presented in this chapter, the variation in aspectinterpretation and the effect of aspect on the temporal structure of discourseare not seen as independent phenomena. On the contrary, I am going to use thesemantics of aoristic and imperfective aspect developed in chapter 4 to accountfor the common temporal patterns found in Ancient Greek discourse. Apartfrom this semantics, we need one additional ingredient to explain the observedpatterns: a specification of how the topic time of an utterance is determined. Itis here that the dynamic feature of DRT, which I haven’t exploited until now,will become essential. In chapter 4 I have already mentioned for specific caseswhat the topic time was, without providing a general heuristic. Technically,the topic time was simply treated as a free variable that receives its valuefrom the context in a way that was not specified. In the present chapter, Iwill provide a more principled treatment of the topic time. I will treat it as an
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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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76 Chapter 4. An analysis of aorist
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Page 92 and 93: 82 Chapter 4. An analysis of aorist
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182 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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