Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

4.4 Selectional restriction of the aorist 85the predicate, and, hence, from the existence of an eventuality that makes anunbounded predicate true and that is included in the topic time, it cannot beconcluded that the maximal eventuality is included in the topic time as well.This is illustrated on the left-hand side of Figure 4.5. The dotted line indicatesthe possibility of a larger eventuality to which the predicate applies.aoristimperfectivetopic timeeventuality time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Figure 4.5: Aorist and imperfective with unbounded predicatesSo, on the basis of its semantics (101b) we would expect that the aoristcan also be used if the maximal eventuality includes the topic time, as longas some eventuality of the right kind is included in the topic time. This,however, is not the case. Hence, for the interpretation of completion withunbounded predicates, the semantics of the aorist (101b) does not suffice. Theinterpretation we want to get is that the maximal eventuality is included inthe topic time, whereas the semantics gives us only that some eventuality isincluded in the topic time.This problem can be solved by restricting the aorist to bounded predicates.This means that if the aorist is confronted with an unbounded predicate, a coercionoperator comes into play that maps the unbounded predicate onto abounded one. In the next section we will see that one of these coercion operators,the maximality operator, yields the complexive interpretation. ThereI will also show that a restriction of the aorist to bounded predicates at thesame time explains the restriction of the ingressive interpretation of the aoristto unbounded predicates.The right-hand side of Figure 4.5 shows that for imperfective aspect thesemantics given in (101a) is enough to yield the processual interpretation, evenwith unbounded predicates. For it may be that the eventuality that includesthe topic time is not maximal with respect to the predicate, but this makes nodifference for the interpretation: the maximal eventuality will also include thetopic time, so we still get the interpretation that the eventuality is going on.Now that I have shown that the semantics of the aorist (101b) is not enoughto account for the data and argued that adding an aspectual class restrictionwould be useful, it is time to ask where this restriction comes from. What is