Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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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.
3.2 The perfective-imperfective distinction 61Suppose that (85a) is a question of a judge in a court room and (85b) theanswer of a witness. The judge’s question fixes the topic time, the time aboutwhich the witness is asked to speak. If the book was in Russian at sometime in the past, it is still in Russian at the time of utterance. This meansthat if tense would concern the relation between the time of the eventualityand the time of utterance, we would expect to have a present tense in thesecond part of the answer (it is in Russian), since the time of the eventualityof the book being in Russian overlaps with the utterance time. By contrast,the topic time is completely in the past of the utterance time. The fact thatin the second sentence of (85b) a past tense is used, is therefore taken as anargument that tense concerns the relation between utterance time and topictime. As a consequence, the relation between eventuality time and utterancetime is only indirect, mediated via the topic time: Aspect relates eventualitytime to topic time and tense relates topic time to utterance time.Klein’s proposal correctly predicts that sentences with imperfective andperfective aspect behave differently in this respect. Whereas in (85) (withimperfective aspect according to Klein) it is possible that the eventuality ofthe book being in Russian overlaps with the utterance time, in (86) (withperfective aspect according to Klein), it is not.(86) Mary wrote the letter.Klein’s theory explains this in the following way: if t TT precedes n and τ(e)includes t TT (imperfective aspect), it is possible that τ(e) includes n as well,but if τ(e) is included in t TT (perfective aspect) this is not possible. This isrepresented graphically in the upper part of Figure 3.6.It should be noted that this argument is not compulsory if one acceptsnon-maximal eventualities (with respect to a predicate) as eventualities (inthe extension of the predicate) in the way Krifka does. If the distinction betweenperfective and imperfective aspect is a distinction between quantisedand homogeneous predicates (in line with Krifka 1989b and de Swart 1998),we get the correct results as well, without mediation of a topic time. This isillustrated in the lower part of Figure 3.6. Given the definition of homogeneousreference, the existence of an eventuality e of which a homogeneous predicate(imperfective aspect) holds does not preclude the existence of a larger eventualitye ′ of which the predicate holds that includes the time of utterance. This,however, is impossible with quantised predicates (perfective aspect).Gerö and von Stechow (2003) and Paslawska and von Stechow (2003)(henceforth von Stechow et al.) adopt Klein’s semantics for tense and aspectand formalise it in a typed lambda-calculus. In their accounts aspect stillconcerns the relation between topic time and eventuality time, but an aspectmorpheme does not correspond one-to-one to such a temporal relation. Morespecifically, they claim the following temporal relations to be of importance
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Aspect in Ancient GreekA semantic a
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viNick Asher, David Beaver, the lat
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Contentsix8 Conclusions and discuss
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2 Chapter 1. Introductiongroundbrea
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4 Chapter 1. Introduction(4) µετ
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6 Chapter 1. Introductionimperfecti
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110 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoris
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122 Chapter 5. Aspect and performat
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134 Chapter 6. The temporal structu
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158 Chapter 7. Comparison to theori
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172 Chapter 8. Conclusions and disc
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178 Appendix A: The language of Com
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192 Appendix B: Examples spelled ou
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206 Appendix C: List of abbreviatio
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208 Appendix C: List of abbreviatio
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210 References(Eds.), Cross-linguis
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212 ReferencesGrice, P. (1975). Log
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214 ReferencesLemmon, E. J. (1962).
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216 Referencesvan der Sandt, R. (19
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220 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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222 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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