Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

48 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticsfollows Krifka in treating sentences in the passé simple as quantised (=telic)and sentences in the imparfait as homogeneous (=atelic). For de Swart, however,quanticity is not only a property of predicates, as it is for Krifka, butalso of eventualities. In her view the domain of eventualities consists of quantisedand homogeneous eventualities. The class of homogeneous eventualitiescomprises what de Swart calls states and processes; quantised eventualitiesare called events. See Table 3.1 for the aspectual classifications used in theaccounts discussed until now. 18 Kamp Krifka De Swartstativenon-stativeet al.unbounded statesstateshomogeneousatelicprocessesbounded events telic quantised eventsTable 3.1: Aspectual class terminology according to authorThe composition of aspect plays a crucial role in de Swart’s (1998) analysis.Therefore, before examining the passé simple and imparfait, let us first take alook at the overall structure of tense and aspect as assumed by de Swart.Like Krifka, de Swart assigns grammatical aspects a semantics that mapsproperties of eventualities onto properties of eventualities, or equivalently, setsof eventualities onto sets of eventualities. Furthermore, tense takes scope overgrammatical aspect. The semantics of tense introduces existential closure overthe eventuality variable and locates the eventuality with respect to the utterancetime.Grammatical aspects are treated as operators that return sets of eventualitiesof a certain type, for example states. De Swart calls such operatorsaspectual operators. The effect of such aspectual operators is a change in theaspectual class of the predicate when the type of the input of the operatoris different from that of the output. The English progressive, for example, isclaimed to deliver sets of states:(69) a. John smiled.b. John was smiling.b ′ . [ s PAST [ s PROG [ p John smile]]]18 Again, for Krifka the classification is a classification of predicates only, for Kamp et al.and de Swart also of eventualities. I have chosen to identify Kamp et al.’s states with theclass of unbounded rather than stative eventualities. The table is meant to leave implicitwhether stative predicates are atelic or neither telic nor atelic in Krifka’s account. Stativeand bounded in Table 3.1 are meant as theoretically neutral terms. Those are the terms Iwill use in the analysis to be developed in chapter 4.