Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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174 Chapter 8. Conclusions and discussionthe tragic aorist as the use found in performatives and adopt the semantics oftense and aspect that I propose, this use of the aorist is readily understood.Moving beyond the level of the sentence I showed that the analysis alsoaccounts for the way in which aspect choice influences the temporal structureof discourse. To explain the observed common temporal patterns, the proposedsemantics of aspect was complemented with a specification of how the topictime of a clause is determined in a discourse. This was achieved by treatingthe topic time as an anaphor and specifying its default binding rules. Thisalso provided an explanation for the immediative use of imperfective aspect.Furthermore, the anaphoric nature of the topic time ensured the degree offlexibility required to allow for deviations from the common patterns under theinfluence of particles, world knowledge, etc. Moreover, I have shown how thevariation in interpretation of the aorist and the imperfective and the temporalstructure of discourse are two sides of the same coin, since the two features ofaspect interpretation crucially depend on each other.I formalised my analysis in a form of Discourse Representation Theory withlambdas, a fusion of two important frameworks for natural language semantics:DRT and Montague Semantics. The choice for DRT was determined bythe need to deal with intersentential anaphora (in the form of an anaphorictopic time), for which DRT is the natural option. I supplemented this frameworkwith mechanisms from the lambda calculus in order to explicate how themeanings of the various constituents of a sentence determine the meaning ofthe sentence as a whole. The combination of these two frameworks was idealfor showing how the broad range of phenomena concerning aspect interpretationin Ancient Greek can be explained on the basis of a simple semantics foraorist and imperfective.In this study of aspect in Ancient Greek, we came across a variety ofissues that are at the heart of philosophy of language and formal semantics/pragmatics:competition between forms, the intricate interactions betweenlinguistic and extralinguistic knowledge, compositionality, reinterpretation, cooperativitybetween speaker and hearer, the inextricable connections betweensentence and discourse interpretation, and performativity, just to mention afew. In this way, I hope that the contributions of this thesis are not restrictedto the specific question it addresses, but that it also shows how fruitful it is tocombine insights from Ancient Greek linguistics and formal semantics.8.2 Future researchIn the course of this study I have come across a number of issues that deservecloser attention than they could be given here. In this section I collect someof them and formulate them as pointers to future research.The first one concerns the puzzling use of the imperfective, described in sec-
8.2 Future research 175tion 7.3, for eventualities that are intuitively complete. As I mentioned there,a closer comparison with the Russian data may be of help in understandingthis use.Another remaining puzzle is that of the generic aorist, the use of the (past)aorist for general truths, mentioned in section 2.4.4. The problem is not somuch its past tense feature, which I think can be explained from the lack ofthe form present–aorist, as I did with the tragic aorist. The real challenge isto explain its aspect feature. Again, I believe that a comparison with similarphenomena in Slavic languages is promising. See, for example, Klimek (2008a,2008b) on the use of the (present) perfective in generic contexts in Polish.A third issue concerns the future. Without paying much attention to it,I have treated it as a tense. I claim that it locates the topic time after theutterance time, in the same way as the past tense locates it before the utterancetime and the present tense locates it at the utterance time. This seems correctfor the indicative. In some respects, however, the future rather behaves like anaspect, for example in the participle forms. Ancient Greek has four participles:the imperfective, the aorist, the perfect, and the future participle. The formerthree do not have a tense morpheme, but do have an aspect morpheme. Thus,in these environments the future morphology stands in opposition to aspectmorphemes, which suggests that it is itself an aspect rather than a tense. Ihave ignored this dual nature of the future and treated it as a tense.This brings us to aspect in the non-indicative verb forms in general. AlthoughI present the proposed analysis as a general analysis of aspect andalthough the analysis is in principle compatible with the fact that the aspectopposition is found throughout the verbal paradigm, this study has largelyfocused on aspect in the indicative. It remains to be seen whether the analysisalso holds for the imperative, for example, a mood that is notably puzzlingwith respect to aspect choice (see, for example, Bakker 1966, Sicking 1991).Finally, there are some points of a more technical nature. I mention hereonly the formulation of the habitual and ingressive operators. The ones I haveused capture the temporal facets that were relevant for my purposes. If onetries to formulate more sophisticated operators, however, one gets involvedin intricate (philosophical) debates concerning causality and change, amongother things. I leave this too for future research.
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Aspect in Ancient GreekA semantic a
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viNick Asher, David Beaver, the lat
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Contentsix8 Conclusions and discuss
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2 Chapter 1. Introductiongroundbrea
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4 Chapter 1. Introduction(4) µετ
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6 Chapter 1. Introductionimperfecti
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1.3 Organisation of the thesis 9In
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Chapter 2The interpretations of aor
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2.3 Additional interpretations of t
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2.5 The challenge 21scriptions of h
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24 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal sema
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3.2 The perfective-imperfective dis
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 673.3.1 Aspe
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 69bials ((88
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 71the term c
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3.3 Aspectual coercion 73in the ext
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76 Chapter 4. An analysis of aorist
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122 Chapter 5. Aspect and performat
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Page 188 and 189: 178 Appendix A: The language of Com
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Page 220 and 221: 210 References(Eds.), Cross-linguis
Page 222 and 223: 212 ReferencesGrice, P. (1975). Log
Page 224 and 225: 214 ReferencesLemmon, E. J. (1962).
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Page 230 and 231: 220 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
Page 232 and 233: 222 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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