Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

170 Chapter 7. Comparison to theories in Classicsof information structure, or maybe something else.In this light, it is interesting to consider to Grønn’s (2003) dissertationabout a similar phenomenon in Russian. He develops a temporal approach toaspect in general, but wants to explain the often observed fact that Russianimperfective aspect is sometimes used for complete eventualities (see, for example,Forsyth 1970, to whom Sicking also refers). He labels this the factualuse of imperfective aspect. In order to explain the data, Grønn has to makequite some distinctions within this use. First he divides the factual use intothe presuppositional and existential use. According to Grønn, with the former,the existence of the eventuality to which the verb refers is presupposed.This resembles Sicking’s account in terms of focus. Grønn recognises howeverthat this does not hold for all instances of the factual imperfective. With theexistential use, the existence of the eventuality is asserted rather than presupposed.The class of existential uses isn’t homogeneous either, and Grønndivides it into an experiential, bidirectional, and cyclic use. I don’t knowwhether the phenomena in Russian and Ancient Greek are exactly the same,but the Russian data may shed new light on this puzzle in Ancient Greek.To conclude, I take it to be the major drawback of Sicking’s focus accountthat the key notion of focus is ill-defined. On the above-given interpretation ofthis notion, which seems the one intended by Sicking, his account is untenableas a general account of aspect. This is due to (i) its inability to deal withthe temporal interpretations, (ii) its inability to explain the lack of a form foraoristic aspect and present tense, and (iii) the existence of counterexamples.Nevertheless, I acknowledge the existence of examples that are problematic fora temporal account of aspect.In this chapter I have discussed two influential approaches to Ancient Greekaspect found in the literature, that of Ruijgh in terms of temporal relationswith respect to a moment donné and that of Sicking in terms of focus. I haveargued that the account of aspect developed in the present work is preferableover both.