Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

56 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticscertainly extends to operators that are always vacuous. More importantly, itwould be a strange move conceptually. The situation would be as follows. Wehave a clearly visible morpheme and a clear semantic contribution, but insteadof relating the two, we would say that the semantics of the morpheme itselfis vacuous and we would attribute the observed semantic contribution to acoercion operator. (Note that we cannot say that the coercion operator correspondsto the morpheme, since coercion operators are not morphologicallyexpressed by definition.)Actually, the fact that Ancient Greek has a distinct morpheme for aspectforms a serious drawback for all three options of the coercion approach discussed(de Swart’s analysis and the two adapted versions): they all entail thataoristic and imperfective morphology are semantically vacuous (in the first twoversions the semantic effect of choosing either one would be attributed entirelyto aspectual restrictions from other sources, in the latter to the restrictionsof the (vacuous) aspectual operator itself). Note that this problem holds notonly for Ancient Greek, but for all languages in which the aspectual oppositionis found throughout the paradigm, like, for instance, the Slavic languages.In sum, not only the temporal part, but also the coercion element of deSwart’s proposal turns out to be untenable for Ancient Greek. Recall furthermorethat the latter part of the analysis already causes a problem for French:it wrongly predicts that the habitual interpretation of the imparfait occursonly with quantised predicates. That this prediction is also falsified by theAncient Greek data can be seen from (80) (= (13)), (81) (= (15)), and (82):(80) πειδ δepeidē deτtowhen prtπαιδίον γένετοpaidion egenetothe.nom child.nom exist.pst.aor.3sgµν, hēmin, hēwe.dat the.nomµήτηρmētērατauto θ ή λ α ζ ε νethēladzenmother.nom it.acc suckle.pst.IPFV.3sg“When the child was born to us its mother suckled it.” Lys. 1.9(81) ΗHēδdeµάχηmachēσφέωνspheōnνēnπap’the.nom prt battle.nom they.gen be.pst.ipfv.3sg fromππων,hippōnδρατάdorataτεte φ ρ ε ο νephoreonµεγάλαmegalaκαkaihorses.gen spears.acc prt carry.pst.IPFV.3pl long.acc andατοautoithey.nomσανēsanbe.pst.ipfv.3plππεεσθαιhippeuesthaimanage.horse.ipfv.infγαθοίagathoigood.nom“They (= the Lydians) fought on horseback, carried long spears, andthey were good at managing horses.” Hdt. 1.79.3.