Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

More documents

Recommendations

Info

86 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoristic and imperfective aspectthe rationale behind it? This question Gerö and von Stechow (2003) don’t givean answer to. Instead, they simply state that the aspectual class restrictionfollows from the semantics of the aorist (see section 3.2.4).I claim that the rationale behind the proposed restriction of the aorist tobounded predicates is that without this restriction some situations describableby the imperfective of a predicate P could be expressed using the aorist of P aswell. This would be the case when an eventuality e to whose runtime IMP(P)applies has at least one part e ′ that is also in the extension of P and this secondeventuality is so small that its runtime is located within the topic time. Figure4.6 illustrates this situation. In this situation the imperfective of P can be usedt TTτ(e)τ(e ′ )Figure 4.6: Overlap between aorist and imperfective with unbounded predicatesas there is a P eventuality whose runtime includes the topic time, viz. e. Butwithout further constraint the aorist could be used, as well, for there is also aP eventuality whose runtime is included in the topic time, viz. e ′ .This unwanted potential overlap between imperfective and aorist is ruledout if the aorist is restricted to bounded predicates. Eventually, this restrictionrepresents an instance of ‘pragmatic strengthening’, which removes semanticoverlap between competing instantiations of the same grammatical feature(here, aspect) (compare this for example with the division of labour betweendefinite and indefinite NPs as proposed by Hawkins 1991). In contrast, theimperfective does not restrict the aspectual class of its argument.Of course, this restriction of aoristic aspect to bounded predicates does notmean that the aorist does not occur with unbounded predicates. Actually,we have seen examples of the aorist with unbounded predicates in section2.1 (examples (19) to (21)). Rather, it means that in those cases a literalinterpretation is not available and reinterpretation is needed in order to makesense of the sentence. More specifically, the unbounded predicate must bereinterpreted as a bounded predicate. In the next section I will show thatsuch reinterpretations can be analysed as the result of coercion operators thatintervene between the semantics of the aorist and its argument. The ingressiveand complexive interpretation of the aorist will be shown to come about in thisway.
4.5 Aorist and coercion: the ingressive and complexive interpretations 874.5 Aorist and coercion: the ingressive andcomplexive interpretationsIn section 4.3 I proposed a semantics for aoristic and imperfective aspect thatdirectly yields the completive interpretation of the former and the processualinterpretation of the latter. In this section I will tackle the ingressive andcomplexive interpretation of aoristic aspect. Section 4.7 is devoted to thehabitual interpretation of imperfective aspect and in section 4.9 we turn to theconative and likelihood interpretation of this aspect.Actually, we already have all the ingredients for the analysis of these interpretations.The analysis consists of (i) the semantics of aoristic and imperfectiveaspect (section 4.3), (ii) the selectional restriction of the aorist forbounded predicates (section 4.4), and (iii) Egg’s Duration Principle (section3.3.3). We just have to put them together.In section 2.1 we have seen that with unbounded predicates, the aoristmay have an ingressive and a complexive interpretation. I propose that theseinterpretations emerge as an attempt to avoid an threatening mismatch betweenthe selectional restriction of the aorist for bounded predicates and theaspectual class of its argument.Let me illustrate how this works. The selectional restriction of the aoristfor bounded predicates causes reinterpretation when the aorist is confrontedwith an unbounded predicate. The mismatch between the restriction of theoperator, AOR, and its argument, the predicate, is avoided by the interventionof coercion operators that map unbounded predicates onto bounded predicates.As a result the complexive and ingressive interpretations arise.The former interpretation, the interpretation of completion with unboundedpredicates, is obtained by the use of a coercion operator that maps the set ofeventualities in the extension of a predicate P onto the set of locally maximalP eventualities. This is exactly what AOR ′ , the simpler version of Krifka’s(1989b) AOR, does (cf. section 3.2.2). To avoid confusion (I don’t use AOR ′ forthe semantics of the aorist itself) I rename the operator MAX.(110) MAX = λPλe[ e ′e ⊏ e ′ → ¬ [ ⊕P(e ′ )]⊕P(e)]Its effect is illustrated in Figure 4.7. Imagine that e 1 is a sleeping eventualityof John from the moment he falls asleep to the moment he wakes up, andthat e 2 , e 3 , and e 4 are parts of this eventuality. These parts are themselves alsosleeping eventualities of John. They are not maximal sleeping eventualities of
Page 3:
Aspect in Ancient GreekA semantic a
Page 6 and 7:
viNick Asher, David Beaver, the lat
Page 9:
Contentsix8 Conclusions and discuss
Page 12 and 13:
2 Chapter 1. Introductiongroundbrea
Page 14 and 15:
4 Chapter 1. Introduction(4) µετ
Page 16 and 17:
6 Chapter 1. Introductionimperfecti
Page 19 and 20:
1.3 Organisation of the thesis 9In
Page 21 and 22:
Chapter 2The interpretations of aor
Page 23 and 24:
2.3 Additional interpretations of t
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31:
2.5 The challenge 21scriptions of h
Page 34 and 35:
24 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal sema
Page 36 and 37:
Page 38 and 39:
Page 40 and 41:
Page 42 and 43:
Page 44 and 45:
Page 46 and 47: 36 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal sema
Page 52: 42 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal sema
Page 57 and 58: 3.2 The perfective-imperfective dis
Page 77 and 78: 3.3 Aspectual coercion 673.3.1 Aspe
Page 79 and 80: 3.3 Aspectual coercion 69bials ((88
Page 81 and 82: 3.3 Aspectual coercion 71the term c
Page 83 and 84: 3.3 Aspectual coercion 73in the ext
Page 86 and 87: 76 Chapter 4. An analysis of aorist
Page 110 and 111: 100 Chapter 4. An analysis of aoris
Page 132 and 133: 122 Chapter 5. Aspect and performat
Page 144 and 145: 134 Chapter 6. The temporal structu
Page 146 and 147:
136 Chapter 6. The temporal structu
Page 148 and 149:
Page 150 and 151:
Page 152 and 153:
Page 154 and 155:
Page 156 and 157:
Page 158 and 159:
Page 160 and 161:
Page 162 and 163:
Page 164 and 165:
Page 166 and 167:
Page 168 and 169:
158 Chapter 7. Comparison to theori
Page 170 and 171:
Page 172 and 173:
Page 174 and 175:
Page 176 and 177:
Page 178 and 179:
Page 180 and 181:
Page 182 and 183:
172 Chapter 8. Conclusions and disc
Page 184 and 185:
Page 186 and 187:
Page 188 and 189:
178 Appendix A: The language of Com
Page 190 and 191:
Page 192 and 193:
Page 194 and 195:
Page 196 and 197:
Page 198 and 199:
Page 200 and 201:
Page 202 and 203:
192 Appendix B: Examples spelled ou
Page 204 and 205:
Page 206 and 207:
Page 208 and 209:
Page 210 and 211:
Page 212 and 213:
Page 214 and 215:
Page 216 and 217:
206 Appendix C: List of abbreviatio
Page 218 and 219:
208 Appendix C: List of abbreviatio
Page 220 and 221:
210 References(Eds.), Cross-linguis
Page 222 and 223:
212 ReferencesGrice, P. (1975). Log
Page 224 and 225:
214 ReferencesLemmon, E. J. (1962).
Page 226 and 227:
216 Referencesvan der Sandt, R. (19
Page 228 and 229:
218 References
Page 230 and 231:
220 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
Page 232 and 233:
222 Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch)
show all

Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?