Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

80 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspectpretation of imperfective aspect and the completive interpretation of aoristicaspect. 2The temporal relation I assign to imperfective aspect deviates from theone proposed by von Stechow et al. (τ(e) ⊇ t TT ). The reason for this deviationis the following. The intuition that imperfective aspect indicates that theeventuality is ‘going on’ is not captured by the semantics of von Stechow etal. A necessary ingredient for capturing this intuition is a continuation of theeventuality after the end of the topic time, a constellation that the semanticsof von Stechow et al. allows for but does not require. For bounded predicates,von Stechow et al. can save their analysis by the insertion of a progressivecoercion operator, as we will see in section 4.8. This, however, does not workfor unbounded predicates. In (102), for example, von Stechow et al.’s semanticsdoes not account for the intuition that the running is ‘not yet completed’:(102) Pierre c o u r a i t.Pierre run.pst.IPFV.3sg“Pierre was running”By contrast, this intuition is captured if we assign imperfective aspect a semanticswhich entails that the topic time is a non-final part of the time of theeventuality, cf. (101a).As for tense, following Kamp et al., Klein, and von Stechow et al., I take itto make reference to some particular time (the topic time) and to temporallylocate this time with respect to the moment of utterance. The analyses ofKamp et al. and von Stechow et al. differ from that of Klein (see (84)) withrespect to the temporal relation assigned to the present tense. I will follow theformer two and claim that with the present tense the topic time is rather thanincludes the utterance time. 3 I propose the following semantics for the threetenses present, past, and future:(103) a. PRESENT λQ[tTT = n ⊕Q(t TT)] = PRESb. PAST λQ[tTT ≺ n ⊕Q(t TT)] = PASTposal, which indicates that the question whether the aorist has to do with completeness orcompletedness (see, e.g., Comrie 1976:18–19) turns out to be a non-issue once one considersthe notions as relative with respect to a reference point.2 I will discuss the complexive interpretation of the aorist, that is, the interpretation ofcompletion with unbounded predicates, in sections 4.4 and 4.5. As I will show there, thesemantics of the aorist in (101b) on its own does not suffice to deal with this interpretation.3 See section 5.3, footnote 2 for the motivation of this decision.