Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

6.3 Analysing the patterns 153ππεεσθαιhippeuesthaimanage.horse.ipfv.infγαθοίagathoigood.nom“Now at this time there was no nation in Asia more courageous orbraver than the Lydian. They fought on horseback, carried longspears, and they were skillful at managing horses.” Hdt. 1.79.3Since imperfective aspect passes on the topic time, τοτον τν χρνον toutonton chronon ‘in that time’, which specifies quite a long time, still is the topictime when we interpret the clause δρατά τε φρεον µεγάλα dorata te ephoreonmegala ‘they carry.ipfv long spears’. Since a simple carrying eventuality is tooshort to include such a long time we get a habitual reinterpretation. A habitualcarrying eventuality can include the topic time. Since the duration associatedwith other predicates in the passage is longer, we don’t find reinterpretationwith them, although the topic time is the same.In this section I have shown that the reinterpretation phenomena of chapter4 and the phenomena of narrative progression discussed in the present chapterboth depend on the same principles, viz. the default binding rules for theanaphoric topic time.6.3.5 Flexibility requiredIn the previous subsections we have seen how the semantics of aspect proposedin chapter 4 together with the default binding rules for the anaphoric topictime yields the temporal patterns commonly found with certain aspect combinations.As one may however expect of an anaphor, the topic time sometimesbinds to a previously introduced time different from the one determined by thedefault rules, or even accommodates. 11 The choice to deviate from the defaultmay be triggered by world knowledge, information structure, the presence ofdiscourse particles (abundant in Ancient Greek), et cetera, and intricate interactionsbetween these factors. 12 A relatively simple non-default case is (165),here repeated as (191):(191) διαφέρουσι δέ σφι π ση̋ τν πλεµον τ κτω τεϊ συµβολ̋ γενο-µένη̋ συνήνεικε στε, τ̋ µάχη̋ συνεστεώση̋, τν µέρην ξαπίνη̋νκτα γενέσθαι. Τν δ µεταλλαγν τατην τ̋ µέρη̋ Θαλ̋ Μιλήσιο̋ τοσι Ιωσι π ρ ο η γ ρ ε υ σ ε σεσθαι, ορον προθέµενο̋νιαυτν τοτον ν τ δ κα γένετο µεταβολή.“They were still warring with equal success, when it happened, at an11 See section 3.2.1 for the notion of accommodation.12 See Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) Segmented Discourse Representation Theory for aframework that models the influence of these kind of information sources on the temporalstructure of English discourse.