Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

7.3 Sicking: aspect as focus 165“After that Mardonius sent as a messenger to Athens Alexander, aMacedonian, son of Amyntas, partly because the Persians were akinto him (...), and partly Mardonius sent him because he learned thatAlexander was a protector and benefactor of the Athenians.” Hdt.8.136In (196) the same sending eventuality is mentioned twice, the first time withaoristic aspect, the second time with imperfective aspect. At first sight atleast, this use of the imperfective is puzzling for any temporal theory of aspect,since it is intuitively used for a complete eventuality. That the imperfectivesometimes seems to be used to refer to complete eventualities hasoften been observed in the literature (e.g. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950:277,Kühner and Gerth 1898:143). Many grammars note that this phenomenon isparticularly common with verba dicendi in the broad sense (ibidem). Examplesof verbs that display this behaviour are κελεω keleuō ‘to order’, πέµπωpempō ‘to send’, and δέοµαι deomai ‘to ask’. Blass (1889:410) speaks of Verba,Handlungen bezeichnend, die ihr Ziel und ihre Vollendung in dem Thun einesAndern haben (‘verbs that refer to actions that find their goal and completionin the action of someone else’).Several attempts to save a temporal account for these kind of exampleshave been proposed in the literature. One popular approach is to claim thatthe meaning of the above mentioned verbs does not correspond to the meaningof the English translations that I gave but that the so-called Fortwirkung ispart of the meanings of these verbs too (see e.g. Svensson 1930:passim, Hettrich1976:61–62). On this view the Greek verb πέµπω pempō in (196) refers to aneventuality that consists not only of the sending of a messenger but also itseffect, that is, the messenger go and tell his message. Even if the sendingitself is completed, the imperfective can be used as long as its effect is not yetcompleted.Note that in order to deal with examples like (196), we have to assumethat the verbs in question are ambiguous, since the aorist in the first clauseis not taken to indicate that the Fortwirkung is completed, that is, that themessenger completed his task. It’s only the sending itself that is completed.Sicking (1991, 1996) is not convinced by this solution and takes exampleslike (196) to be a reason to develop a new, non-temporal approach to aspectin Ancient Greek. He claims that the choice of aspect relates to focus ratherthan temporal relations. More specifically, he argues that with the aorist, incontrast to the imperfective, the verb has focus function, a notion that hedescribes as follows:... I will, without further ado, use the terms ‘focus function’ forthe part of the unit involved that, from a viewpoint of information,is the most prominent in the sense of being its ‘nucleus’, or the