Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

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