Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

6.3 Analysing the patterns 141has been previously introduced in the discourse. 4,5 It is for this very reasonthat I have adopted the dynamic framework of DRT. As a consequence of thetopic time being an anaphor, the time to which t TTi binds, that is, by defaulta time immediately following τ(e) i−1 if sentence i–1 has aoristic aspect,has to be made available in the interpretation process of sentence i–1 already.This is done in the following way: an aoristic sentence introduces not only theeventuality it describes into the discourse context, but also a new time, whichfollows the eventuality and acts as the default topic time for the eventuality ofthe new sentence. Imperfective sentences do not introduce such a subsequentpoint. They pass their own topic time on to the next sentence. Thus aoristic,but not imperfective, aspect pushes the topic time further, so to speak. Accountslike this one are called pushing accounts. Earlier examples of pushingaccounts are the ones of Hinrichs (1981, 1986) and Partee (1984) for English,to which the present one comes quite close. 6This account deviates from the account of Kamp et al., discussed in section3.2.1, in several respects. Their account is a pulling rather than pushing account.On pulling accounts sentences do not push the time forward. Moreover,not the topic time itself, but the reference point, is treated as an anaphor. Recallthat tense on their account introduces the instruction to temporally relatethe location time of the eventuality at hand to a time previously mentioned inthe discourse. Thus, two elements have to be resolved: the reference point hasto be determined and the temporal relation has to be specified. The referencepoint is by default the location time of the last mentioned eventuality, thetemporal relation is succession for events, and inclusion for states.The two types of accounts explain the phenomenon of narrative progressionin different ways. Let me illustrate the difference with (169) (=(40)):4 It has been argued that tenses cannot be treated as anaphors in general. The behaviourof tense in attitude reports has been put forward as a counterexample to the anaphoricnature of tense (e.g. von Stechow 1995). This is due to the fact that tense interpretationin such contexts involves egocentric de se binding (Lewis 1979), which forms a tension withanaphoricity in most frameworks. Bary and Maier (2009) show, however, that tenses inattitude reports are anaphoric just as well and propose an extension of DRT in which thetension between the two features of tense interpretation is resolved. In this extension updatesof the common ground are accompanied by updates of each relevant agent’s attitudinal state.The proposed framework can capture both the de se feature and the anaphoric feature oftense interpretation at the same time and thus shows that the behaviour of tense in attitudereports is not a counterexample to the anaphoric nature of tense. See also Kamp (2006).5 In this context it is interesting to note that according to Ruijgh (1991:212, n. 10) andBeekes (1995:226) the past tense morpheme (the augment - e-) probably comes from atemporal anaphoric pronoun with the value ‘at that time’.6 One difference is that in the present account it’s grammatical aspect that determineswhether a new time is introduced to act as topic time for the next sentence, whereas inHinrich’s and Partee’s accounts this is determined by aspectual class (that is, whether thesentence describes an event or state).