Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

7.2 Ruijgh’s moment donné 163utterance timemoment donnéeventuality timeFigure 7.4: The first tense option and the lack of a form for present-aorist,revised versioncomes from the present tense, then this account wrongly predicts that theredoesn’t exist a form for present tense and imperfective aspect either. If it comesfrom the aoristic aspect feature, on the other hand, the account deviates fromRuijgh’s original account, since then aspect does not only concern the relationbetween the eventuality time and the moment donné, but also that betweenthe eventuality time and some other time. The intuition of completion is nolonger captured in terms of the relation between eventuality time and momentdonné, but requires a second temporal relation to capture it. But if we havethis second temporal relation (a temporal relation that reminds us of the oneI propose for aoristic aspect), what do we need the moment donné for?I have shown that the absence of the form present-aorist cannot be explainedon Ruijgh’s analysis for aspect if we assume the first or second optionfor the semantics of tense. 5 It is explained on the third option: if the presenttense indicates that both the eventuality time and the moment donné overlapwith the moment of utterance, and aoristic aspect indicates that the eventualityis situated completely before the moment donné, there is a clash. As5 Of course, one could try to find a different kind of explanation for the absence of thisform, not in terms of a clash between semantic features. However, Ruijgh himself wants toexplain the absence in terms of such a semantic clash:Le thème d’aoriste [aoristic aspect] ne dispose pas d’un indicatif primair[present tense]. En effet, une forme constituée d’un thème d’aoristeimmédiatement suivi d’une désinence primaire exprimerait deux valeurs incompatibles:l’achèvement de l’action avant le moment présent et la présencede l’action au moment présent.(The aorist theme [aoristic aspect] does not dispose of a primary indicative[present tense]. In fact, a form made up of an aorist aspect immediately followedby a primary inflection would express two incompatible values: theachievement of the action before the moment of utterance and the presence ofthe action at the moment of utterance.) Ruijgh (1991:201)Note that this extract indeed suggests the third tense option: the present tense indicatesthat both the moment donné and the eventuality time are, or overlap with, the moment ofutterance.