The Ancient Greek tragic aorist revisited

Bary, Corien

doi:10.13109/glot.2012.88.1-4.31

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…As seen above, the truth conditions of a present perfective sentence are arguably hard to be met. The event in the denotation of the verbal phrase has to coincide with the utterance time for a perfective present sentence to be true (Parsons 1990;Bary 2012). This happens only with verbs that denote very short events whose run time can match the length of the utterance (e.g.…”

Section: Deriving the Implicational Generalizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicational generalizations in morphological syncretism: The role of communicative biases

Storme¹

2021

J. Ling.

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Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for grammatical features interacting in syncretic patterns are fixed across languages. More specifically, this approach predicts that grammatical contexts that are less probable or more informative about a target grammatical feature $ T $ should favor syncretism of $ T $ cross-linguistically. The paper provides evidence for these predictions based on four detailed case studies involving well-known patterns of contextual syncretism (gender syncretism based on number, gender syncretism based on person, aspect syncretism based on tense, and case syncretism based on animacy).

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Section: Deriving the Implicational Generalizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicational generalizations in morphological syncretism: The role of communicative biases

Storme¹

2021

J. Ling.

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“…Bary argues that performatives are present perfectives, for which there is no satisfactory Greek tense since the present indicative is not perfective and the (perfective) aorist indicative is not present. 30 Both present and aorist are thus, according to her, suboptimal for performatives. The problem is that her theory implies that present and aorist would be used indifferently throughout Greek literature for performatives, but in fact the present is overwhelmingly the most common tense for performatives at all periods and in all genres, including fifth-century tragedy.…”

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confidence: 98%

The Hortative Aorist

Lloyd

2018

The Class. Q.

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The final section on the aorist indicative in Goodwin'sMoods and Tensesidentifies the following usage: ‘In questions with τί οὐ [‘why not’], expressing surprise that something is not already done, and implying an exhortation to do it’. Other scholars identify urgency or impatience in these questions. Albert Rijksbaron writes: ‘Questions with the 1stor 2ndperson of the aorist indicative, introduced by τί οὖν οὐ or τί οὐ, often serve, especially in Plato and Xenophon, asurgent requests[original emphasis] … The aorist indicative is more emphatic than the present: the speaker observes that a state of affairs which he apparently wants to occur has, in fact, not occurred, and he asks his interlocutor why it has not.’ Kühner and Gerth explain it as follows: ‘Der Redende wünscht in seiner Ungeduld gewissermassen die begehrte Handlung als eine schon geschehene zu sehen’ (‘the speaker impatiently wants, as it were, to see the desired action as one that has already been done’). They contrast allegedly less urgent examples in the present (‘der Ton der Frage ist alsdann ruhiger’, ‘the tone of the question is thereby milder’). These scholars stress the pastness of the aorist tense in communicating urgency and impatience: ‘Why have you not …?’. This remains the dominant view, regularly repeated in commentaries.

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“…These speech acts were formally marked by the aorist andthough less frequentthe perfect. When considering the rationale behind this, Dekker refers to Bary (2012), who finds the "aoristic aspect" to be the optimal aspect for performatives. Unfortunately, Dekker does not elaborate on Bary's theory, which, in turn, is based on Klein's (1994) concept of tense and aspect.…”

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confidence: 99%