Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 53sensitive past tense operators.Second, there are no distinct morphemes for tense and aspect within thepassé simple and imparfait morphology. Instead temporal and aspectual informationis encoded in a single morpheme. This favours an analysis thatcombines both contributions into one operator.Third, on an analysis in terms of aspectual operators, the operators correspondingto imparfait and passé simple would in many cases apply vacuously.For the imparfait this would hold when the input is already a set of homogeneouseventualities, as in (72), and for the passé simple when the input isalready a set of quantised eventualities, as in (73). According to de Swart,for reasons of economy, a language would use a neutral form in these casesrather than an aspectually marked form. On an analysis as aspectually sensitivetense operators, the operators corresponding to the imparfait and passésimple never apply vacuously as they always locate an eventuality with respectto the utterance time.Finally, in contrast to the progressive in English, neither the passé simplenor the imparfait specifies one particular aspectual transition. We have seenthat the passé simple may receive an ingressive interpretation or an interpretationof completion, and the imparfait a habitual or processual interpretation.At least intuitively, this fits well with a coercion analysis: the mismatch somehowhas to be resolved, and it may be that there is more than one way inwhich this can be done.In the next section I will apply de Swart’s proposal to the Ancient Greekdata. But let me first point at a problem for this coercion analysis that canalready be observed in French. Since the various interpretations found areput down to coercion, the analysis predicts that we find special interpretationsonly in case of a mismatch between the requirements of the operator and theaspectual class of its argument. For some interpretations, this prediction iscorrect. It rightly predicts that we find the ingressive interpretation of thepassé simple only with homogeneous predicates (the data at this point are thesame in French and Ancient Greek). But it also predicts that the habitualinterpretation of the imparfait would occur only in case of a mismatch, thatis, with a quantised input, and this prediction is not borne out. We see in(78) that we also observe the habitual interpretation of the imperfective withhomogeneous predicates, such as I sleep.(78) QuandWhenj’Iétais petit, je ne d o r m a i s pasbe.pst.ipfv.1sg young I not sleep.pst.IPFV.1sg notbien.well“When I was young I didn’t sleep well.”It is important to note that in de Swart’s account a reinterpretation operator