Some general thoughts on tense and aspect in Modern Greek

Abstract

Robert Bielecki & Kamil Trąba. Some general thoughts on tense and aspect in Modern Greek. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, PL ISSN 0079-4740, pp. 39-54The morphological categories belonging to the semantic dimension of Tense in Modern Greek, as it is traditionally conceived, seem to be distinguished by means of non-homogeneous criteria. In this paper the temporal and aspectual meanings are treated separately. In consequence, Modern Greek has at its disposal (i) six Tenses and (ii) two Aspects. The meanings of the six Tenses are captured systemically by means of three Time-points: (i) Event Time, (ii) Reference Time and (iii) Speech Time, which are referred to each other in the order given by means of the relations of (i) previousness and (ii) simultaneity. In turn, the meanings of the two Aspects are captured by means of the notions of (i) Shortness and (ii) Longness, which are identified as the bedrock of the aspectual oppositions in Modern Greek. Other aspectual meanings such as Termination, Inchoativity, Completion, etc. are conveyed by the lexical stems of the appropriate verbs linked with the affixal markers of the two Aspects.

Compositional and Verbal Aspect in Greek: The Aorist Imperfect Distinction and the Article-Aspect Interplay

“…Greek has VA just like the Slavic languages, and Slavic aspectology has a huge tradition but publications on Greek aspect in Slavicist terms are rare (Tarpomanova 2013, Marku 2019, Dimitrova 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; some offer mixed approaches, Germanic-Slavic (Bielecki andTrąba 2018, Trąba 2019). Most publications do not take a clear stand on whether Greek, being unquestionably a VA language, should be analyzed through a VA approach (Slavic-like) or this could be done successfully in CA terms too.…”

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“…Greek has VA just like the Slavic languages, and Slavic aspectology has a huge tradition but publications on Greek aspect in Slavicist terms are rare (Tarpomanova 2013, Marku 2019, Dimitrova 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; some offer mixed approaches, Germanic-Slavic (Bielecki andTrąba 2018, Trąba 2019). Most publications do not take a clear stand on whether Greek, being unquestionably a VA language, should be analyzed through a VA approach (Slavic-like) or this could be done successfully in CA terms too.…”