Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 31However, in a discourse the contribution of aspect can be observed more clearly,as is illustrated with (40) and (41) (from Kamp and Rohrer 1983:253):(40) Pierre entra. Marie t é l é p h o n a.Pierre enter.pst.pfv.3sg. Marie phone.pst.PFV.3sg“Pierre entered. Marie made a phone call.”(41) Pierre entra. Marie t é l é p h o n a i t.Pierre enter.pst.pfv.3sg. Marie phone.pst.IPFV.3sg“Pierre entered. Marie was making a phone call.”The most natural interpretation of (40) is that the two eventualities are consecutive:Marie starts telephoning after Pierre has come in. In (41), Marie isalready talking on the phone when Pierre comes in. It seems that that thechoice of aspect affects the interpretation of the temporal relation.Kamp et al. use (or actually develop) DRT to account for this observation.The following discussion is based on Kamp and Rohrer (1983) and Kamp andReyle (1993). It is, however, reformulated in the two-stage presupposition-asanaphoraversion of DRT introduced in section 3.2.1.1.The interpretation of the temporal relations in (40) and (41) is put downto the combination of the contributions of tense and aspect. Let’s start withthe contribution of tense. Following Partee (1973), Kamp et al. argue thattenses are anaphoric in nature, just like pronouns. In the same way in whichin (25) he picks up John and it the dog introduced by the first sentence, theeventualities described in the second clauses of (40) and (41) are interpretedas temporally related to the ones described in the first sentences. As withpronouns, we need the information conveyed by the first sentence to interpretthe second sentence.The natural choice to deal with this context dependence is dynamic semantics.Static semantics would give us something like (42): 5(42) ∃e∃t[p enter(e) ∧ τ(e) = t ∧t ≺ n] ∧∃e ′ ∃t ′ [m phone(e ′ ) ∧ τ(e ′ ) = t ′ ∧t ′ ≺ n]Here τ is a function that maps eventualities onto their runtime, i.e. the timethey actually take up. (42) states that there is a timetbefore (≺) the utterancetime n (for now) which is the runtime of an eventuality e of Pierre enteringand a second time t ′ before n which is the runtime of an eventuality e ′ of Mariephoning. What these truth-conditions do not capture is that the speaker makesreference to some particular time. (42) locates the phone call at an arbitrarytime t ′ before the utterance time, not related to the time of Pierre’s entrance5 An overview of the symbols for temporal relations is given in Appendix C.3.