Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

154 Chapter 6. The temporal structure of discourseencounter which occurred in the sixth year, that during the battle theday was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretoldaorthis loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year inwhich the change did indeed happen.” Hdt. 1.74.2(191) is an example of the aorist where we go backward rather than forward innarrative time: the natural interpretation is that the prediction of the eclipsehappens before the eclipse itself. Here the default binding rule for the aoristis overruled by the lexical knowledge that one foretells something before ithappens. I believe that for (191) it is natural to assume that a time in thepast of the eclipse is accommodated to which the topic time of the foretellingclause binds.The fact that the Ancient Greek aorist shows quite a large degree of flexibilitycan be partly explained by the fact that this language does not have aform that exclusively expresses that an eventuality takes place prior to some(contextually given) reference time, that is, a form to express a past-in-thepast(the Greek pluperfect indicating a perfect-in-the-past, see e.g. Kühner andGerth 1898:151). Lacking such a form, Ancient Greek has to find a solutionand uses the aorist in this case, as in (191). By contrast, in French, which hasits plus-que-parfait to express a past-in-the-past, the passé simple does not allowfor a reverse order interpretation (in absence of a temporal adverbial) (seee.g. Molendijk et al. 2004:284–288). (192) (from Molendijk et al. 2004:285),for example, does not have the interpretation that the pushing precedes thefalling, in contrast to its English translation (193) (from Lascarides and Asher1993:438):(192) Max tomba. John le poussa.Max fall.pst.pfv. John him push.pst.pfv“Max fell. John pushed him.”(193) Max fell. John pushed him.The use of the passé simple to express a past-in-the-past is blocked by theexistence of a better form to express this. 13 Ancient Greek, on the other hand,lacking this form, can use the aorist and deviate from its default binding rules.6.3.6 Autonomous use of the aoristThis leaves me with the autonomous use of the aorist, the use of the aorist foreventualities that are not situated in the time of the story, as illustrated in (166)and (167). The impression is that in these cases the eventualities are presented13 This leaves unexplained why in English, having a pluperfect serving as a past-in-thepastform, it is possible to get a reverse order interpretation with the simple past, as (193)shows.