Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 49The sentence in (69a) describes a process. Remember that the expression Johnsmile in (69b ′ ) is meant to indicate the verb with its arguments, without tenseand grammatical aspect. This expression refers to a set of processes, indicatedby the subscript p. The progressive operator maps this set onto a set of states,as shown by the subscript s. Tense does not change the aspectual class, hencethe subscript s again.Not only do aspectual operators deliver outputs of a certain kind, they mayalso impose restrictions on the kind of sets of eventualities they take as theirinput. (70) serves to illustrate this:(70) *John is being tall.As has often been observed, the progressive normally does not combine withstative predicates. Most analyses (e.g. Dowty 1979, Moens 1987) reflect this bytreating the progressive as an operator that requires a non-stative expressionas its input. Thus, the semantics of the progressive maps sets of non-stativeeventualities onto sets of stative eventualities. Given that John be tall is astative expression, the ungrammaticality of (70) (indicated by the asterisk) isexplained.However, there seem to exist exceptions to this input requirement of theprogressive. In (71a) we find such an apparent exception:(71) a. #John is being funny.a ′ . [ s PRES [ s PROG [ ns C s→ns [ s John be funny]]]]In contrast to (70), (71a) is grammatical, in spite of the stative nature of Johnbe funny. Its grammaticality is commonly explained through reference to thenotion of coercion, which also occupies a central place in de Swart’s analysisof the passé simple and imparfait. Coercion refers to the phenomenon that ifthere is a mismatch between the input requirements of an operator and theproperties of its argument, the argument is reinterpreted in such a way thatit satisfies the requirements (see section 3.3 for an indepth discussion). Thisreinterpretation allows the two to combine. This process is illustrated in Figure3.5. In this figure, corresponding to the two vertical arrows, there are two waysin which the mismatch can be resolved.Let’s apply this to (71). The mismatch between the requirements of theprogressive operator and the (stative) predicate John be funny is resolved byreinterpretation of the stative expression as a non-stative expression, corresponding,for example, to John act funny (see e.g. Moens 1987). That is, theclass of the argument is coerced by the progressive operator into the requiredclass. In (71a ′ ), C s→ns indicates this coercion operator from a set of stativeto a set of non-stative eventualities (with the subscript ns for non-stative).After this reinterpretation, the progressive operator can apply. The stativeexpression John be tall, on the other hand, cannot be reinterpreted as a non-