Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

50 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticsoperatorargumentcoercion❄✲❄✲Figure 3.5: Coercionstative expression, since it is hard to think of a process that is associated withbeing tall, which explains the contrast between (70) and (71a). Following theestablished convention, henceforth sentences that are only grammatical afterreinterpretation (but not on a literal interpretation) are marked with a hashsign (#). It should be noted that the decision whether we are dealing withreinterpretation is often theory-dependent.How does all this relate to the passé simple and imparfait? The fact thatsentences in the passé simple always describe quantised eventualities whereassentences in the imparfait describe homogeneous eventualities seems to suggestthat the semantics of the passé simple and imparfait are aspectual operatorsthat map sets of eventualities onto sets of quantised and homogeneous eventualities,respectively. 19 De Swart indeed claims that the passé simple andimparfait are sensitive to the quantised versus homogeneous distinction, butshe implements this in a different way.De Swart argues that the passé simple and imparfait are not grammaticalaspects, and hence do not correspond to aspectual operators, but rather toaspectually sensitive past tense operators, that is past tense operators with restrictionson the aspectual class of their input. The semantics of passé simpleand imparfait are not functions from sets of eventualities onto sets of eventualities,but select for particular sets of eventualities, the passé simple forsets of quantised eventualities, the imparfait for sets of homogeneous eventual-19 In the spirit of Mourelatos (1981) (applied to Ancient Greek by Armstrong 1981), Bach(1986), and Krifka, with the difference that Krifka does not refer to homogeneous andquantised eventualities, but rather predicates of eventualities.