Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

58 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticsfective to coercion, we expect to find ‘special’ interpretations only in case ofan aspectual mismatch. That is, for the perfective, we expect it only when itsinput is homogeneous. This appealing feature is lost on an account in termsof aspectual operators. If, for example, the input is already a set of quantisedeventualities but not of starting eventualities, the aspectual operator optionwrongly predicts that the function corresponding to the ingressive interpretationof the perfective can map it onto a set of starting eventualities to yieldan ingressive interpretation. So, whereas the aspectual operator option rightlypredicts that if its input is homogeneous there must be a special interpretation,it wrongly predicts that if the input is quantised there can be a specialinterpretation.Note the asymmetry between perfective and imperfective aspect in thisrespect. The ingressive interpretation of perfective aspect is restricted to homogeneouspredicates. This restriction follows from a coercion approach, butneeds an independent explanation on an aspectual operator approach. Onthe other hand, we have seen that the habitual and processual interpretationsof imperfective aspect are not restricted to quantised eventualities. This is aproblem for a coercion approach, but not for an aspectual operator approach.It is a desideratum of any analysis of perfective and imperfective aspect thatit can handle this asymmetry.All variants of de Swart’s (1998) account discussed in this section havein common that the perfective and imperfective induce a change in aspectualclass (either inherently or by coercion). They share this property with Krifka’saccount (section 3.2.2), and in a way also with the account of Kamp et al.(section 3.2.1). Admittedly, although the crucial difference between the passésimple and imparfait is analysed as a difference in aspectual class, the latteraccount does not pay much attention to the composition of aspect. Instead ituses this distinction in aspectual class to account for a difference in narrativeprogression. De Swart, on the other hand, exploits it to account for anotherphenomenon concerning the perfective and imperfective: the variation in interpretation.The fact that in all three accounts the difference between perfectiveand imperfective aspect comes down to a difference in aspectual class makesthem representatives of what we may call one-component theories of aspect(following Smith 1997 who calls the theory she proposes a two-component theory).In a one-component theory the distinction between bounded (telic) andunbounded (atelic) and the distinction between perfective and imperfective aresemantically the same; what differs is the level at which these notions apply:perfective and imperfective are grammatical aspects (or, as de Swart wouldsay, aspectually sensitive tense operators) whereas boundedness (telicity) isa notion at the level of the predicate argument structure, the predicate withits argument slots filled. Grammatical aspect has scope over the predicateargument structure and may change the aspectual class of the predicate.