Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

1.3 Organisation of the thesis 9In chapter 4 I propose my analysis which integrates ingredients of the fourtheories about the perfective–imperfective distinction discussed. New to myanalysis of the interpretations of aoristic and imperfective aspect is the centralplace taken by Egg’s Duration Principle. This principle, which states thatinformation on the duration of an eventuality introduced by various linguisticexpressions must be mutually compatible, is crucial in explaining how thevarious interpretations come about.For expository reasons, the analysis of one of the interpretations of theaorist, the so-called tragic interpretation, is postponed to chapter 5. I showthat this use is readily understood on the basis of the proposed semantics ofaspect, once one recognises the tragic aorist as the use found in performatives.In chapter 6 we go beyond the level of the sentence and move on to theeffect of aspect on the temporal structure of discourse. I demonstrate how thesemantics of aspect proposed in chapter 4 explains the often observed differencebetween aoristic and imperfective aspect in this respect. The proposed accounttreats the variation in the interpretation of aspect and the effect of aspect onthe temporal structure of discourse as two sides of the same coin, whereasprevious accounts in formal semantics tend to concentrate on one or the otherof these two features of aspect interpretation.In chapter 7 I compare the analysis developed in this thesis with two influentialaccounts proposed by classical scholars, the ones of Ruijgh and Sicking,and I show why my account is preferable.In chapter 8 I present my conclusions.