Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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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.
3.3 Aspectual coercion 673.3.1 Aspectual classificationsAspectual classifications are based on a number of tests that check the compatibilityof a predicate with a certain linguistic environment in a literal interpretation(that is, without reinterpretation). The results of these tests areinterpreted as reflecting properties of the predicates tested and these propertiestogether constitute a classification. In the following I will first discuss theclassifications and then the tests on which they are based.The properties relevant in the classifications used in the coercion analysesdiscussed here are stativity, boundedness, telicity, and punctuality. Until nowI have used telicity and boundedness interchangeably, but from now on I willuse Egg’s (2005) terminology, in which the two are distinguished. I will returnto this point at the end of this section.Without providing definitions, the following are some preliminary characterisationsof what these notions refer to: Stative predicates can be true of amoment; bounded predicates introduce inherent boundaries for eventualities;telic predicates are predicates with which a poststate is associated; and finally,punctual predicates refer to eventualities with extremely short or no durationor without inner structure.Table 3.2 shows which of these four properties play a role in the coercionaccounts discussed. A + sign indicates that the property is relevant in theclassification at hand.stativity boundedness telicity punctualityMoens and Steedman + + +De Swart + +Egg + + +Table 3.2: Aspectual properties according to different authorsThe combination of these properties results in the classifications displayedin Table 3.3. 31 The rightmost column gives an example of each of the six classesof predicates that result if one would accept all four properties as relevant foraspectuality.Let’s now turn to the tests. I will only discuss some of the tests proposedin the literature (see Dowty 1979 for an extensive discussion). Keep in mindthat whether a sentence is acceptable on a literal interpretation or is in needof reinterpretation (indicated by the # sign) is at least partially theory dependent.Stative predicates (like John be in the pub) and punctual predicates (likeJohn cough) have in common that they combine readily with time point adver-31 I intend to leave open in this table whether stative predicates are atelic (as in Egg 2005)or the notion of telicity is simply not applicable to stative predicates (as in Moens andSteedman 1988).
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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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1.3 Organisation of the thesis 9In
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Chapter 2The interpretations of aor
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2.3 Additional interpretations of t
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116 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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218 References
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220 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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222 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
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Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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