Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

52 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semantics“Jeanne d’Arc was a saint.”(74) has a processual, (75) a habitual, (76) an ingressive, and (77) a complexiveinterpretation. (Notice the similarities with the interpretations of imperfectiveand aoristic aspect in Ancient Greek.) On de Swart’s analysis, these interpretationsare the result of coercion triggered by the past tense operators. 21The variation in interpretation is the result of the different ways in which theaspectual mismatches can be resolved. A habitual and a processual interpretationresolve a mismatch for the imparfait, an ingressive and a complexiveinterpretation do this for the passé simple.De Swart presents a number of arguments to analyse the passé simple andimparfait as aspectually sensitive tense operators rather than as aspectualoperators. I will briefly discuss four of them.The first reason is the fact that the passé simple and imparfait show up onlyin the past tense. This in contrast to, for example, the English progressive,which can be combined with past, present, and future tense. If one analyses thepassé simple and the imparfait as aspectual operators, one has to explain thisrestriction, whereas it follows naturally from an analysis in terms of aspectually21 De Swart is the most explicit defender of this view on the passé simple and imparfait,but we find it in some of the work by Kamp as well. He discusses this view most explicitlyin an unpublished research report on French:As temporal operators PS [passé simple] and Imp [imparfait] coincide; bothindicate that the episode described lies somewhere in the past of the utterancetime. But as aspectual operators they are diametrically opposed, as VPs in theImp always have a “stative” and those in the PS always have a “non-stative”interpretation. The circumstance that PS and Imp always put their aspectualsignature on the VPs to which they are applied has important implications. Itmeans that when these tenses combine with verb phrases of a different aspectualsignature the result will be a VP with a different aspectual status, andtherefore one whose meaning differs from that of the underlying untensed VP.The interpretation which is needed when the aspectual signatures of tensedand untensed VP clash is reminiscent of what we have said above about progressivessuch as is being funny – with the proviso that in the case of PS andImp the need for reinterpretation arises when the aspectual class of the untensedVP does not agree with that of the result of applying the tense, whereasthe progressive necessitates reinterpretation precisely when there is agreement(i.e. when the underlying VP is itself a stative). While reinterpretation is necessaryboth when a PS applies to a stative VP and when the Imp applies toa non-stative one, the reinterpretation strategies are quite different in the twocases. Kamp (1992:45)That Kamp has a coercion analysis in mind can be concluded from the fact that he comparesthe aspectual shifts that we find with the passé simple and imparfait with the coercion shiftthat the progressive provokes with stative expressions (from stative to non-stative), ratherthan with the shift that is inherently associated with the progressive (from non-stative tostative).