Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

7.3 Sicking: aspect as focus 169imperfective aspect is used to describe a new, foregrounded eventuality, focusseems to concern how important the information is (Sicking 1991:32). Anothercomplication is that ‘focus function’ plays a role at two levels. Accordingto Sicking (1996:77) focus function has to do both with (i) the informationfunction of the verb form within the clause, and (ii) the information functionof a clause within the sentence or larger context. For aoristic aspect to be used,the verb has to have focus function within the clause and the clause has tohave focus function within the sentence or larger context. With imperfectiveaspect, on the other hand, either the verb does not have focus function withinthe clause, or the clause does not have focus function within the sentence orlarger context. 8,9 The fact that the term focus is used in these different sensesmakes that this theory is as far from a unified theory of aspect choice as is atheory that would use different words for these different senses.For the above-mentioned reasons I reject Sicking’s theory as a general accountof aspect. 10 This is not to say, however, that Sicking isn’t right inpointing out that examples like (196) are problematic for a temporal accountof aspect. Admittedly, I don’t have an explanation for the use of the imperfectivein these cases. It is unclear to me whether we have to look for anexplanation in terms of the Fortwirkung associated with the verb, or in terms8 The dual nature of Sicking’s notion of focus becomes clear from the following quote:Aorist indicative verb forms and participles 1) are to be assigned focus function(or: are the ‘nucleus’) in the clause they are part of, and 2) are the predicateof a self-contained statement (. . . ) By using Imperfect indicatives or Presentparticiples, on the other hand, a speaker (or writer) signals to his audience (orreadership) that the verb form at hand is not meant to perform an independentinformation function. Either the PS [present stem] verb form indicates that itis not to be taken as the ‘nucleus’ of its clause, the speaker wanting to focuson some other constituent within the same clause, or the statement in whichthe PS verb form is the predicate, is to be connected with another statement(or other statements) in the immediate or wider context – bearing no focusitself, but being just one time in a series or otherwise owing its relevance tosome other statement.Sicking (1996:105)9 Sicking claims that with the aorist both explications of focus function have to be fulfilled.This means that his account cannot be saved from the above-mentioned counterexamples byclaiming that the aorist is used in these examples because (although the verb does not havefocus function with its clause) the clause has focus function within the sentence or largercontext. Deviating from Sicking and giving up the idea that both criteria have to be fulfilledwouldn’t help either, as it is not clear what this would mean for imperfective aspect. Couldimperfective aspect be used only if neither the verb is the focus of the clause, nor the clausethe focus of the context, or would one of the two be enough reason for imperfective aspectto be used? If the latter, the theory would become too flexible.10 Sicking (1991) ascribes focus a more modest role than Sicking (1996). In the formerfocus seems to be presented as one of the factors that determines aspect choice, whereas inthe latter it is the sole factor (Sicking 1996:74).