Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

7.2 Ruijgh’s moment donné 161Actually, the problem is worse than this: not only are the actual remarksat odds with a uniform account of tense, it is simply impossible to combineRuijgh’s account of aspect with a uniform account of tense, even if we ignorehis remarks about the location of the moment donné for the various tenseaspectpairs. In other words, Ruijgh’s account of aspect is problematic for anyuniform semantics of tense, as I will show now.There are (at least) two phenomena that Ruijgh would like to explain withhis approach to aspect: the autonomous use of the aorist (see the previouschapter) and the lack of a form for the combination present tense and aoristicaspect (see chapter 5). As I will show, however, given Ruijgh’s analysis ofaspect, these two phenomena impose conflicting constraints on a theory oftense. The former requires the first tense option, the latter the third.Let’s start with the autonomous use of the aorist. This use is the reasonwhy Ruijgh allows the moment donné to be the moment of utterance for thecombination past-aorist, since he claims that with this use the moment donnéis the moment of utterance. Imperfective aspect then does not have this use,for with the past-imperfective the moment donné cannot be the moment ofutterance. 4 As we have seen, the fact that with the combination past-aoristthe moment donné can be the moment of utterance excludes the second andthird options: tense does not locate the moment donné with respect to themoment of utterance. Hence, the autonomous use of the aorist requires thefirst tense option, in which tense locates the time of the eventuality with respectto the moment of utterance.But now let’s consider the second phenomenon, the absence of a form forthe combination of present tense and aoristic aspect. This phenomenon canonly be explained on the third tense option. To see this, let’s start with thesecond option, since it is immediately clear that this option doesn’t work. Iftense would locate the moment donné with respect to the moment of utterpresenttense and imperfective aspect. However, the combination of these two contributionsdoes not result in the moment donné being the moment of utterance, as I will explain. Onthe first option, the present tense indicates that the time of the eventuality overlaps withthe moment of utterance. (Note that on the first option, it is impossible to say that withthe present tense the time of the eventuality is (rather than includes or overlaps with) themoment of utterance, since then we could only describe very short eventualities with thepresent tense, which is not the case.) The combination of the two contributions allows theconstellation that both the moment of utterance and the moment donné are included in thetime of the eventuality, without the moment of utterance being equal to or overlapping withthe moment donné. Hence, we cannot save a uniform account in this way.4 Stated this way it is not so much of an explanation of course, since why can’t the momentdonné be the utterance time for the past-imperfective? One could try to turn it into anexplanation in the following way: if the utterance time functions as the moment donné andimperfective aspect indicates that the eventuality time includes the moment donné, then theeventuality time overlaps with the utterance time, and hence we expect the present tense.For aoristic aspect, on the other hand, since the eventuality time precedes the momentdonné, the eventuality precedes the utterance time, and hence we expect past tense.