Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 39not the latter the notion is used to account for the phenomenon of narrativeprogression. With its emphasis on the role of the location time the formeraccount comes quite close to the account of Klein to be discussed in section3.2.4.Let’s summarise and evaluate the DRT proposals of aspect discussed in theforegoing. As a dynamic framework, DRT is particularly suited to deal withthe contribution aspect makes to a discourse. In the accounts discussed, thefact that we interpret the eventualities described in a discourse as temporallyrelated to each other is ascribed to the anaphoric nature of tense. Aspectserves to specify this temporal relation. Here the distinction between eventsand states is crucial. Sentences in the passé simple (perfective aspect) describeevents, sentences in the imparfait (imperfective aspect) describe states, andevent-describing sentences connect to a discourse in a way different from statedescribingsentences.Two questions remain unanswered in these accounts. First, why is it thatevents and states behave differently? That is, we get the correct results becausein the construction algorithm events are made to follow the reference point andstates to include it, and events to be included in the location time and states toinclude it or, at least, overlap with it. But why do events and states engage indifferent temporal relations with the reference point and location time? Whatproperty of events and states (or eventive and stative predicates) accountsfor this difference? In fact, it remains unclear what is the difference betweenstates and events and therefore these proposals have little explanatory power.The second remaining question is how the ingressive interpretation of perfectiveaspect and the habitual interpretation of imperfective aspect come about.With the focus on the effect of aspect on the temporal structure of discourse,the DRT proposals discussed ignore these interpretations. It may be that theaccounts help to understand the main distinction completed (perfective) versusnot-completed (imperfective), but they do not solve the puzzle concerning thevarious interpretations of both perfective and imperfective aspect. It is thispuzzle that is central to this thesis. Ideally, an account of aspect should give auniform treatment of these two features of the interpretation of aspect, viz. thevariety in interpretation and the effect on the temporal structure of discourse.In the following subsection I will come back to the first question. I willdiscuss an alternative and less ad hoc account of the temporal phenomena theDRT accounts were concerned with, using Krifka’s notions of homogeneousand quantised reference. In section 3.2.3 I will discuss an extension of DRTthat deals with the second issue.