Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

6.3 Analysing the patterns 151him saying: ‘What a distance is there between what you are doingnow and a little while ago! After declaring yourself happy you weep.’” Hdt. 7.45-46.1In section 4.5 I mentioned as the reason for getting an ingressive interpretationin (189) that it is clear from the continuation that Xerxes is still crying at themoment of Artabanus’ utterance. What is implicit in the argument is theassumption that aoristic aspect pushes the topic time forward, an assumptionthat we have made explicit in this chapter. Let’s see how this assumptionyields the ingressive interpretation.The second clause of (189) introduces an eventuality in the discourse, e 1 inFigure 6.4, that is related to crying. It may be a maximal crying eventuality oran ingressive one. Which of the two is unknown at this point in the discourse.Since the sentence has aoristic aspect, this crying related eventuality is temporallyincluded in the topic time t TT1 . Moreover, the aoristic aspect introducesinto the discourse a time immediately following the crying related eventuality.This time t TT2 acts as topic time for the next sentence. Since the participleµαθών mathōn ‘perceive.aor’ has aoristic aspect too, following the same recipeit introduces into the discourse an eventuality e 2 included in t TT2 and a timefollowing this eventuality, t TT3 , which acts as topic time for the main clause.The saying eventuality e 3 is temporally included in t TT3 . 10 Artabanus uses apresent tense (imperfective aspect) to describe a crying eventuality e 4 , whichindicates that this eventuality temporally includes the time of his utterance.t TT1τ(e 1 )t TT2τ(e 2 )t TT3τ(e 3 )τ(e 4 )Figure 6.4: Applying the rules to (189)Let’s now return to δάκρυσε edakruse ‘cry.aor’ in the first sentence. If10 ερετο eireto ‘say’ is an imperfective form. It is a common phenomenon in Ancient Greekthat verbs of saying occur in the imperfective form where we would expect an aorist, viz. forcomplete eventualities. I return to this in section 7.3. For the present example it makes nodifference since the aorist forms δάκρυσε edakrusa ‘cry’ and µαθών mathōn ‘perceive’ pushthe time forward already.