Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

66 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticsaspect, a classification of theories of aspect is not the aim of this thesis. Ratherthe aim is to answer the challenge I set in section 2.5 to account for the variousinterpretations of imperfective and aoristic aspect in Ancient Greek withoutresorting to ambiguity. The discussion in the first part of this chapter hashelped us on our way to meet this challenge. It has made it clear what are theuseful and problematic parts of each theory when applied to the Ancient Greekaspectual system. Let me recapitulate the crucial points. The discussion ofthe DRT of Kamp et al. approach has made it clear that if we want to dealwith the effects of aspect in discourse, the natural choice is dynamic semantics.De Swart’s approach in terms of coercion seems to be useful for dealing withthe variation in interpretation, but if we use it the way she does we end upwith a vacuous semantics for aoristic and imperfective morphology in AncientGreek. A good point of the accounts by Klein and von Stechow et al. is thatgrammatical aspect is not semantically vacuous. The downside is that it isnot clear how their accounts can handle interpretative variation. Moreover, ifwe use the idea of coercion we must specify what kind of mismatch is solvedby the coercion process. We have seen in section 3.2.3 that for imperfectiveaspect this cannot be a mismatch in aspectual class. For aoristic aspect it maybe a mismatch in aspectual class, but then we must answer the question, leftunaddressed by von Stechow et al., how this aspectual class restriction followsfrom the semantics of aoristic aspect.Now, it’s the challenge to find an account that combines the advantages ofeach of these theories but leaves out the problematic parts. In chapter 4 I willoffer such an account. But I will first go deeper into the subject of coercion,as this concept will play a crucial role in my analysis.3.3 Aspectual coercionThe phenomenon of coercion has already been discussed briefly in section 3.2in relation to de Swart (1998). Since it will play a prominent role in myanalysis of the interpretations of aoristic and imperfective aspect, I will nowtake a closer look at this phenomenon. Again, the discussion is not meant as acomprehensive overview of the literature on this topic. In fact, I discuss onlytwo approaches: Moens and Steedman’s, because they were the first to discussaspectual coercion as a topic in its own right, and Egg’s, because his DurationPrinciple features prominently in the analysis I propose in chapter 4.Since any theory on aspectual coercion comes with an aspectual classification,I start with a brief overview of the aspectual classifications used in theanalyses discussed, in order to facilitate the understanding of this discussion.The actual classification I use myself is not introduced until section 4.2.