Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

60 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticsis included in the topic time. 26 I will use t TT and τ(e) rather than Klein’s TTand TSit, for the topic time and the eventuality time, respectively, to havea uniform representation of the various accounts discussed in this thesis. 27 τstill is the function that maps eventualities onto their runtime.(83) imperfective: τ(e) ⊃ t TTperfective: τ(e) ⊆ t TTThis may remind the reader of the account of Kamp et al. discussed in section3.2.1. But apart from a small difference with respect to the temporal relations(Kamp and Reyle 1993 and Kamp, van Genabith, and Reyle 2005 haveτ(s) ○t and τ(s) ⊇ t for states (imperfective aspect), respectively), there isalso a more important difference between the two accounts (but see p. 65): inone-component theories, such as the ones of Kamp et al. and de Swart, thelink between grammatical aspect and the temporal relation between the topictime (location time) and the runtime of the eventuality is only indirect: grammaticalaspect primarily changes aspectual class, aspectual class determinesthe relation between the topic time and the time of the eventuality, and in thisway grammatical aspect indirectly influences the relation between the topictime and the time of the eventuality. In Klein’s two-component account, onthe other hand, locating the eventuality with respect to the topic time is theprimary contribution of grammatical aspect.I will now briefly discuss Klein’s (1994) view on tense. Like Kamp et al.,he claims that it establishes a temporal relation between the topic time andthe time of utterance (TU, here n). Present tense indicates that the topic timeincludes the utterance time, past tense, that it (completely) precedes it, andfuture, that it (completely) follows it:(84) present: t TT ⊇ npast: t TT ≺ nfuture: t TT ≻ nKlein puts some effort in arguing that tense concerns the relation between topictime and utterance time, rather than between eventuality time and utterancetime. 28 For this he uses the following example:(85) a. What did you notice when you looked into the room?b. There was a book on the table. It was in Russian.26 This is based on Klein (1994:118). On pp. 99-108 he assigns perfective aspect a differenttemporal relation: the topic time overlaps with, but is not (properly or improperly) includedin the eventuality time (t TT ○ τ(e) ∧ t TT ⊈ τ(e)).27 Since Klein does not formalise his account, I use italics (the style used for modeltheoreticentities) rather than the typewriter font (used for expressions in the formal language) inthe representations of the temporal relations he assigns to grammatical aspect and tense.28 What follows is the motivation I referred to in footnote 9.