Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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.