Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Chapter 3Aspect in formal semantics3.1 IntroductionIn the formal-semantic literature, the distinction between perfective (=aoristic)and imperfective aspect has received quite some attention. Examples are Kampand Rohrer (1983) and de Swart (1998) on French, Paslawska and von Stechow(2003) on Russian, and Smith (1997) on the distinction cross-linguistically,to mention just a few. The next section presents a selective survey of theliterature, focussing on those theories from which I integrate elements into theanalysis to be developed in chapter 4.In section 3.2.1 I discuss the position taken in several works by Kampand co-workers (Kamp and Rohrer 1983, Kamp and Reyle 1993, Kamp, vanGenabith, and Reyle 2005). Section 3.2.2 is devoted to Krifka’s (1989b) approachof the perfective-imperfective distinction. The adaptions to the theoryof Kamp et al. made by de Swart (1998) are discussed in section 3.2.3. Section3.2.4 is devoted to Klein’s (1994) proposal for the semantics of the perfectiveimperfectivedistinction and Gerö and von Stechow’s (2003) and Paslawskaand von Stechow’s (2003) formalisation and modification of it. I believe thata discussion of these analyses gives us a better understanding of the requirementsa theory of perfective and imperfective aspect has to meet. In section3.2.5 I will summarise these requirements.The mechanism of coercion, reinterpretation of an expression in order toavoid a semantic mismatch between its constituents, will emerge from thediscussion as extremely useful for our purposes. Given its central position inthe analysis that I will propose in the next chapter, I discuss this phenomenonin more detail in section 3.3.