Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

4.2 Aspectual classes 77stative predicate like John be in the pub is true of an eventuality e, it is trueof all eventualities that are part of e. Non-stative predicates like John waltzdo not have this property, since an eventuality has to consist of at least threesteps before it counts as a John waltz eventuality. They are what Egg (2005)calls interval-based. I define stativity as follows:(100) A property P is stative iff (i) for all e, e ′ if P(e) and e ′ ⊏ e thenP(e ′ ), and (ii) it is not the case that for all e such that P(e) there isno e ′ such that e ′ ⊏ eThe first clause, based on Egg’s (2005:59) definition of interval-basedness,captures the above-mentioned idea that stative predicates are fully divisive,whereas non-stative predicates are not. The second clause adds that stativepredicates are non-punctual, that is, some eventualities in the extension ofsuch a predicate have parts. The addition of this clause guarantees that allbounded predicates are non-stative. Without it, punctual predicates (predicatesthat apply only to eventualities without parts) would be both boundedand stative.Table 4.1 shows the tripartition induced by these two properties of predicates.We have stative predicates, bounded predicates, and predicates thatare unbounded but non-stative, for which I use the term process predicates inline with de Swart.stativenon-stativeunboundedboundedstativeprocessboundedTable 4.1: Aspectual classes of predicatesIn my analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspect only the property ofboundedness plays a role (sections 4.4 and 4.5). I need the property of stativityfor comparing the English progressive and the Greek imperfective (section 4.8).In my classification I only classify predicates of eventualities, not eventualitiesthemselves. In this respect, I follow Krifka and deviate from, for example,de Swart and Egg, who assume different sorts of eventualities on top of adistinction at the predicate level. In the latter accounts bounded predicates,for example, have the property described in (99) and also refer to a set ofbounded eventualities. My first problem with such an approach is that it isnot clear to me which criterion has primacy in such accounts: is a predicatebounded because it has the property in (99) or because it refers to a set ofbounded eventualities? My second objection is that I don’t see why we needan ontological distinction on top of the distinction for predicates, at least not