Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 55the indicative, there are special forms for aoristic and imperfective aspect inevery mood (optative, subjunctive, imperative) as well as for participles andinfinitives (cf. Table 1.1 in section 1.1). What is more, in contrast to French,Ancient Greek has clearly distinct morphemes for tense and aspect. The morphemefor past tense is the augment - e- prefixed to the verb stem. Thismorpheme is obligatory in all and only past tenses. It occurs in combinationwith all grammatical aspects: with the past tense of the imperfective, withthe past tense of the aoristic, and with the past tense of the perfect. It isabsent in the non-past tenses of the indicative, in the non-indicative finiteforms and in the non-finite forms. As for aspect, different verbs realise theimperfective-aoristic opposition morphologically in different ways (first (sigmatic)aorist versus second aorist), but whatever way it is realised, it is doneuniformly throughout a verb’s paradigm.The fact that the imperfective-aoristic distinction in Ancient Greek ispresent throughout the verb paradigm makes it impossible to analyse aoristand imperfective as aspectually sensitive past tense operators. Such an analysiscould only work for the past tense of the indicative, as in non-indicativeforms no temporal contribution is made, while we do find distinct aoristic andimperfective forms. In other words, aorist and imperfective cannot be analysedas past tense operators, or, for that matter, any kind of tense operators.So, the temporal part of de Swart’s account, (iii), is problematic for AncientGreek. What if we leave out this part but hold on to the other ingredients ofde Swart’s account: the various interpretations come about through a coercionprocess that solves a mismatch in aspectual class (i+ii), and imperfective andaorist are sensitive to the homogeneous-quantised distinction (iv).This immediately gives rise to the question: what operator, if not tense,triggers the coercion that results in the various interpretations of the aorist andimperfective? Given that the aspectual opposition is present throughout theparadigm, it must be something that all verb forms have in common. Thereis, however, no such candidate. We would arrive at a variant of de Swart’sproposal in which all verb forms have their own aspectually sensitive operators.For example, the subjunctive of the aorist would be analysed as an aspectuallysensitive modal operator rather than as a combination of an aspectual and amodal operator. And likewise, the optative of the aorist would be analysed as adifferent modal operator with the same aspectual sensitivity rather than as thecombination of the same aspectual operator with a different modal operator.Such a move would obscure the contribution of aspect.An alternative would be to introduce aspectually sensitive vacuous operators,operators that make no contribution apart from imposing restrictionson the aspectual class of the input. It is clear that this wouldn’t be a seriousoption for de Swart, as her objection to operators that are sometimes vacuousfuture tense.