Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

82 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspectλe p king(e)in (105) is the translation of Perdiccas be king of the Macedonians,a predicate over eventualities. To keep things simple, I will not gobeyond this level of detail. The semantics of the imperfective takes the propertydenoted by this predicate as its input. It returns the set of times thatinclude the runtime of an eventuality with this property. This set of times isthe input for the semantics of the past tense. The past tense specifies thatthe topic time which is before the utterance time is one of the times in thisset. The second line of (105) reduces to the last line with the help of lambdaconversion and merging (see (219) in Appendix B for the intermediate stepsin the reduction). The last line reads as follows: there is an eventuality ofPerdiccas being king of the Macedonians that temporally includes the topictime, which precedes the utterance time. The topic time is determined by thetemporal subordinate clause as the time of the invasion by Sitalces. Thus, thesemantics provided for (104) corresponds to its natural interpretation: at thetime about which we speak there is an eventuality going on of Perdiccas beingking. 4 Figure 4.2 represents the outcome graphically.t TT : the time of the invasionτ(e): the time of Perdiccas being kingFigure 4.2: Graphical representation of (105)In the same way the proposed semantics for tense and aspect gives us (107)for the second clause in (106):(106) Κρο̋Kurosδ οπωde oupōCyrus.nom prt not.yetκεν,hēken,be.present.pst.ipfv.3sgλλall’butτιetistillπ ρ ο σ ή λ α υ ν εprosēlaunemarch.to.pst.IPFV.3sg“Cyrus was not yet present, but he was still marching on.”X. An. 1.5.124 My definitions of boundedness and stativity force me to accept non-maximal eventualities(with respect to a predicate) as eventualities (of that predicate) as well (otherwise, allpredicates would be unbounded and non-stative) (cf. the discussion in section 3.2.2 of thedifferent conceptualisations of eventualities in Krifka and Kamp et al.). The consequencefor (104) is that e is not necessarily the locally maximal being king eventuality, since thepredicate is unbounded. It may be that e is part of a larger eventuality of which the predicateholds. This makes no difference for the interpretation, however, since the effect is thesame: the eventuality is not completed within the topic time.