Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 47encountered in 2.1? How do, for example, the ingressive interpretation of aoristicaspect and the habitual interpretation of imperfective aspect come about?Like Kamp et al., Krifka ignores these and it is not clear how his analysis canbe extended to deal with them. The only option seems to be to assume anambiguity between various operators. Aoristic aspect would then be ambiguousbetween AOR and an operator that captures the ingressive interpretation,and imperfective aspect between PROG and a habitual operator. I argued insection 2.5 that it is preferable to do without such ambiguity.This shortcoming of the two accounts discussed brings us to the next analysisof the perfective-imperfective distinction, that of de Swart (1998). Shedeals explicitly with the variation in interpretation of perfective and imperfectiveaspect, and does not rely on an ambiguous semantics for the two.3.2.3 De Swart: aspectually sensitive tense operatorsThe main objective of the DRT analysis of aspect discussed in section 3.2.1was to account for the differences in behaviour between the passé simple andimparfait in discourse, that is, the fact that the former but not the lattermoves the story forward. In section 3.2.2 we saw an alternative explanation ofthis phenomenon in terms of quantised and homogeneous reference. However,neither account can be the full story about perfective (=aoristic) and imperfectiveaspect, as they do not answer the challenge concerning the variousinterpretations of both aspects (cf. section 2.5).De Swart (1998) sets herself the task of complementing the DRT accountof the discourse behaviour of the French passé simple and imparfait with anaccount of how their various interpretations come about. There are strikingsimilarities between the interpretations of the passé simple and imparfait inFrench and those of aoristic and imperfective aspect in Ancient Greek. Asmy main goal in this thesis is to account for the various interpretations ofthe two aspects in Ancient Greek, it is worthwhile taking a close look at deSwart’s proposal. In her analysis, de Swart uses some ingredients from Krifka’saccount, and in this way, her proposal can be seen as a combination of theaccounts of Kamp et al. and Krifka.The remainder of this subsection is organised as follows: first I explainde Swart’s (1998) account of aspectually sensitive tense operators (3.2.3.1),followed by a discussion of its applicability to Ancient Greek (3.2.3.2). We willsee that de Swart’s proposal, despite some very attractive features, runs intoproblems, especially when confronted with Ancient Greek.3.2.3.1 Aspectually sensitive tense operatorsLike Kamp et al. and Krifka, de Swart claims that the distinction between thepassé simple and imparfait corresponds to a distinction in aspectual class. She