Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

32 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticst, contrary to our interpretation of (40) and (41). 6Dynamic semantics, on the other hand, naturally captures the anaphoricfeature of tense: eventualities described in an utterance are interpreted in thetemporal setting established by the context.If tense temporally relates eventualities described in a discourse to eachother, the next question is how to get the specific temporal relations in (40)and (41). Since the only formal difference between the two mini-discoursesis a difference in aspect, the difference in interpretation must come from thecontribution of aspect. Kamp et al. relate the difference in interpretation toa difference between two classes of eventualities, states and events: sentencesin the imparfait describe states, sentences in the passé simple events, andstate-describing sentences connect to the context in a different way than eventdescribingsentences.Before I set out how the two kinds of sentences connect to a discourse, twonotions that feature prominently in the analysis have to be explained, thoseof reference point and location time. The reference point is the (contextuallyshifting) time to which the story has so far advanced. The location time is thetime about which a statement is made. In sentences with temporal adverbials,such as (43), it’s the temporal adverbial (here, on Sunday) that gives thelocation time of the eventuality.(43) Mary was ill on Sunday.To give a uniform account of sentences with and without temporal adverbialsKamp generalises the idea of a location time to the latter class of sentences.That is, the interpretation of sentences without temporal adverbial also involvesa location time. We will see how this works later.On the basis of examples like (43) and (44), Kamp et al. claim that eventsengage in a different temporal relation to their location time than states:(44) Mary wrote a letter on Sunday.The state-describing sentence (43) leaves open whether the whole illness takesplace on Sunday or has already started on Saturday and continues until Monday.In contrast, for the event-describing sentence (44) to be true the wholeeventuality of writing a letter has to take place on Sunday. This is shown in(45) (based on Dowty 1986:49):(45) a. Yes, Mary was ill on Sunday. In fact, she fell ill on Saturday anddid not recover until Monday.b. Yes, Mary wrote a letter on Sunday. In fact, she began writing iton Saturday and did not finish it until Monday.6 Since the domain of person does not concern us in this work, I refrain from internallyanalysing predicates like p enter (for Pierre enter) here and later.