Haug - Aristotle

Aristotle’s kinesis/energeia-test and
the semantics of the Greek perfect1

DAG HAUG
Abstract
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I aim to arrive at a better

understanding of Aristotle’s distinction between kineseis and energeiai in
the Metaphysics 1048b. I argue that in order to understand Aristotle’s test,
we must understand the workings of the Greek perfect better. The main part
of the article is then concerned with the semantics of the Greek perfect from
Homer to classical times, discussing Gerö and von Stechow’s recent contri-
bution (2002). Finally, an interpretation of Aristotle’s test in the light of
this discussion is proposed.
1. Introduction
Linguists presenting the modern taxonomy of aktionsarten2 often refer to

Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1048b, lines 18–35, as the earliest discussion of
this problem. In this passage, Aristotle divides actions — praxeis — in
two groups, which he calls kineseis and energeiai. Although there seems
to be agreement that Aristotle’s distinction is related to modern distinc-
tions of aktionsarten — which go back to the works of Vendler (1957)
(reprinted in Vendler [1967] from which I henceforth cite) and Kenny
(1963) — there is uncertainty as to the exact nature of the relation. Kenny
(1963) was explicitly influenced by Aristotle as he proposed his classifi-
cation, and he a‰rms that Aristotle’s energeiai are his (and our, as the
modern classification is based on those of Kenny and Vendler) activities
and states. In Verkuyl (1993: 50), however, we read that ‘‘Kenny is much
more faithful than Vendler to Aristotle’s division in Metaphysics IX 1048,
18–35, who distinguishes Actualities (States) from Incomplete and Com-
plete Movements.’’ And Graham (1980) has argued that energeiai are our
states, whereas kineseis are non-states, and this opinion is adopted, for
example, in Smith (1997: 17). So there is still need to clear up the confu-
Linguistics 42–2 (2004), 387–418 0024–3949/04/0042–0387

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388 D. Haug
sion, and this is only possible, I shall argue, through a better understand-
ing of the Greek perfect, which plays a crucial role in Aristotle’s test.
However, before we go on to a closer scrutiny of Aristotle’s test, some
brief philological comments should be made. The passage where Aristotle
discusses the kinesis/energeia distinction does in some ways look suspi-
cious: the sentence following immediately upon our lines is a recapitula-
tion of what precedes the discussion of the kinesis/energeia distinction.
Our lines are also omitted in some manuscripts. This led Werner Jaeger
(1957: 184) to the conclusion that the passage is a later addition to the text,
although, as he says, it was probably written by Aristotle himself. The
kinesis/energeia distinction is referred to in other works of Aristotle, and
there can be no doubt that ‘‘it contains sound Aristotelian doctrine and
terminology’’ (Ross 1924: 253). We will therefore follow current usage
and treat the passage as genuine. But it does not really fit in its context,
and this is no doubt part of the reason for the di‰culties in interpreting it.
With regard to the text itself, it is corrupt at some points, but it was vastly
improved by Bonitz, whose emendations seem to have carried conviction.
At any rate, the textual questions do not have implications for the core of
the matter.
2. Aristotle’s and Kenny’s tests
We will now compare the tests of Aristotle and Kenny, starting by citing
Ross’ (1928) English translation of Aristotle (I have added the Greek
terms in square brackets):
Since of the actions which have a limit none is an end but all are relative to the
end, e.g. the removing of fat, or fatremoval, and the bodily parts themselves when
one is making them thin are in movement in this way (i.e. without being already
that at which the movement aims), this is not an action or at least not a complete
one (for it is not an end); but that movement in which the end is present is an
action. E.g. at the same time we are seeing and have seen, are understanding and
have understood, are thinking and have thought (while it is not true that at the
same time we are learning and have learnt, or are being cured and have been
cured). At the same time we are living well and have lived well, and are happy and
have been happy. If not, the process would have had sometime to cease, as the
process of making thin ceases: but, as things are, it does not cease; we are liv-
ing and have lived. Of these processes, then, we must call the one set movements
[kineseis] and the other actualities [energeiai ]. For every movement is incomplete
— making thin, learning, walking, building; these are movements, and incomplete
at that. For it is not true that at the same time a thing is walking and has walked,
or is building and has built, or is coming to be and has come to be, or is being
moved and has been moved, but what is being moved is di¤erent from what has

Semantics of the Greek perfect 389
been moved, and what is moving from what has moved. But it is the same thing
that at the same time has seen and is seeing, or is thinking and has thought. The
latter sort of process, then, I call an actuality [energeia], and the former a move-
ment [kinesis] (Ross 1928: 1048b, lines 18–35)
Aristotle here seems to propose a linguistic test that distinguishes between

kineseis and energeiai. One part of it, the kinesis test, reads in Greek:3
(1) oud’ hugiazetai kai hugiastai

not cure3:SG:MED:PRES: and cure3:SG:MED:PFCT:
Ross translates: ‘‘For it is not true that at the same time we (. . .) are
being cured and have been cured.’’ This seems to say that for kineseis,
the present tense verb entails the negation of the perfect tense verb.4
Similarly, from his wording
(2) eu zēi kai eu ezēken hama
well live3:SG:PRES: and well live3:SG:PFCT: at the same time
‘At the same time we are living well and have lived well’
it seems clear that he is saying that for energeiai, the present tense verb
entails the perfect tense verb.
It is obvious that Aristotle is making an ontological distinction here,
and not a linguistic one. If nothing else, this is clear from the fact that he
has probably made up at least one of the linguistic forms occurring in his
text, namely ezēken, which Ross translates ‘‘has lived.’’ Morphologically,
ezēken is a regular perfect of the verb zō. However, the form does not
occur before Aristotle and only very rarely after, the normal perfect
being the synchronically suppletive (but diachronically related) bebiōke.
bebiōke, however, often has the meaning ‘having lived to the end.’ Thus,
Aristotle’s statement ‘‘we are living, and have lived’’ would simply be
false if he had used the normal Greek perfect of the verb ‘live.’ Therefore,
we may surmise, he made up a new perfect. Now this, of course, means
that Aristotle is speaking about living and not about the Greek verb zō.
But even though Aristotle’s distinction is essentially a philosophical
and ontological one, it has proven interesting for the modern linguistic
classification of verbs, whose beginnings are, significantly, to be found in
the works of the philosophers Vendler and Kenny. Scholars have, how-
ever, not always been aware of the di¤erences between the Greek and the
English perfect. We can see this quite clearly in Ross’ translation. One of
the examples for the kinesis-test reads: ‘‘For it is not true that at the same
time a thing is walking and has walked.’’ This is false: obviously, the
same thing at the same time can be walking and have walked, even if we
allow that both VPs refer to the same event. Of course, we should not

390 D. Haug
ascribe such a fallacy to Aristotle. Rather, something went wrong in the

translation of the Greek perfect into English. Now Ross was clearly mo-
tivated by the desire for a literal translation and thus translated the Greek
perfect using an English one. But ‘has walked’ is naturally understood
as an experiential perfect (or equivalently as an existential perfect ‘there
has been walking,’ see Comrie 1976: 58¤.), and this is a reading that the
Greek perfect cannot have, as we shall see. But first, we turn to Kenny’s
test.
Vendler’s (1967) and Kenny’s (1963) classification of aktionsarten are
founded on Aristotle’s distinctions, and in Kenny’s case, it is explicitly
so. Kenny first distinguished states from events; he then went on to divide
events into activities and performances. In doing this, he proposed a test
to determine whether a given verb is an activity verb or not: for activity
verbs, he claimed, a sentence of the form ‘A is f-ing’ entails ‘A has f-ed.’
For example, ‘John is running’ entails ‘John has run.’ For performance
verbs, however, the situation is the reverse: ‘A is f-ing’ entails ‘A has not
f-ed.’ For instance, if a man is building a house, he has not yet built it; if
John is deciding whether to join the army, he has not yet decided to. It is
immediately clear that Kenny’s test bears a resemblance to Aristotle’s,
and Kenny claims that the activities brought out by the test are part of
Aristotle’s energeiai (which also, according to Kenny (1963: 173, fn.2),
include states). Aristotle’s kineseis, Kenny further claims, are his perfor-
mances.
It has been argued that Kenny’s tests are not contradictory and that
they therefore do not determine two jointly exhaustive classes (Potts
1965: 66–67). The counterpart to the activity test ‘A is f-ing entails A has
f-ed,’ should not be that for performances ‘A is f-ing entails A has not f-
ed,’ but rather the weaker formulation ‘A is f-ing does not entail A has
not f-ed.’ As Graham says, Kenny’s motivation for setting up the tests as
he did was clearly his Aristotelian model. He goes on to defend Kenny:
For performances, ‘A is f-ing’ does not entail ‘A has f-ed’; but furthermore,
because performances are complete only over the whole interval (N.E. 1174a 27–
29), in all cases ‘A is f-ing’ entails ‘A has not f-ed’ for kineseis. Thus, for meta-
physical reasons, the classes picked out by the criteria are jointly exhaustive
(Graham 1980: 118, fn. 2).
Graham’s use of both Aristotelian and Kennyan terms is confusing, but

the point made seems valid enough: if f is a performance and A is f-ing
now, it follows from the semantics of the progressive that A has not yet
completed f-ing, although he may very well do so in the future. This also
works in the past: ‘A was f-ing’ entails ‘A had not f-ed,’ because the

Reichenbachian reference time of the pluperfect is naturally understood

to be identical to the reference time and event time of the past progres-
sive; and it once again follows from the semantics of the progressive that
A had not yet completed f-ing at that time. However, the test breaks
down if we use the simple past to give ‘A was f-ing’ entails ‘A did not f,’
because the simple past introduces a new reference time identical with its
event time, which may very well be later than that of the past progressive.
Hence, the entailment ‘John was writing a letter entails John did not write
a letter’ does not go through — perhaps John finished the letter, we
do not know. The weaker formulation ‘A was f-ing does not entail A
f-ed’ is clearly correct, and it often appears as a test for performances in
the literature.
It seems then that it makes no di¤erence whether we use Kenny’s for-
mulation or the weaker one, as long as we study the relationship between
the present progressive and the perfect, or between the past progressive
and the pluperfect (i.e. in cases where the reference time of the second
sentence is hooked up to the event time of the first) — but the weaker
formulation can also be applied to the relationship between the past pro-
gressive and the simple past. However, this is not necessary for our pres-
ent purposes, so we will stick to Kenny’s original formulation, which is
close to Aristotle’s and therefore particularly useful in comparing Aris-
totle’s classification with the modern ones.
There seem to be no major di¤erences between Kenny’s and Vendler’s
tests. In the following, we shall use Kenny’s since it is explicitly modeled
on Aristotle’s. However, we shall use much of Vendler’s terminology,
since it is more widespread in the modern literature. Since there are many
terminological confusions in this field, it may be useful to state our usage
here: in Vendler’s system, Kenny’s performances are divided into accom-
plishments and achievements, where accomplishments are durative (‘write
a letter’) and achievements punctual (‘win the race’). We will refer to them
as ‘‘accomplishments and achievements’’ (as the di¤erence is mostly
not crucial for our present purposes), or as ‘‘events falling under a telic
predicate.’’ This last formulation points to two other important issues,
one terminological and the other ontological: by ‘‘event’’ we shall mean
loosely ‘‘something that happens’’ and not — as is often seen — a cover
term for accomplishments and achievements (i.e. a synonym for Kenny’s
performances). Further, and this will turn out to be crucial, we shall fol-
low Krifka (1992: 34–35) and others in understanding telicity as a prop-
erty of predicates and not of events. We will return to these issues, which
are important for an understanding of Aristotle’s test, in the last section.
Vendler and Kenny both seem to apply their tests to verbs. As Verkuyl
(1993), discussing Vendler, notes

392 D. Haug
His inclination to stay at the lexical level enforces the idea that what he really did
was to propose ontological categories: if knowledge of the world and knowledge
of a language tie up intimately at some place, they do that at the lexical level and
not so much at the structural level (Verkuyl 1993: 33).
Vendler and Kenny did what we would expect in an Aristotelian tradi-

tion: as we have said, Aristotle’s distinction is essentially ontological and
not linguistic. He does use a linguistic test, but then it is not surprising to
find an ancient Greek holding that the Greek language reflects reality in a
rather direct way.
However, modern linguists have stressed that the categorization of sit-
uation types must be applied to VPs and not to verbs, because the nature
of the object may influence the situation type: draw circles is an activity,
whereas draw three circles is an accomplishment. This can be seen from
Kenny’s test: John is drawing circles entails John has drawn circles (at
least after some time), but John is drawing three circles entails that he has
not yet done so. In the same way, walk in the park is an activity, whereas
walk to the store is an accomplishment.
This phenomenon has been used to ‘‘save’’ Aristotle’s test. As we re-
marked, Ross’ translation says, ‘‘it is not true that at the same time a
thing is walking and has walked.’’ We can make this sentence true in
English by supplying a terminus: ‘‘it is not true that at the same time a
thing is walking from Oxford to Reading and has walked from Oxford to
Reading.’’ In doing this, we have changed the activity ‘to walk’ into a
goal-oriented, durative action, that is, an accomplishment. It can be ar-
gued that Aristotle implies the termini, and such a conception clearly lies
behind Ross’ translation. But if it is possible, we should prefer to interpret
the text as it stands, without making any suppositions as to implicit ob-
jects or termini. The reason for this is that if we start supplying underly-
ing objects and prepositional phrases, we soon run into problems. Where
are we allowed to understand such complements and where are we not?
For example, the object of one’s enjoyment could limit the enjoying in
just the same way as the finished house limits the house building. Fol-
lowing this line of thought, Ackrill (1965) argued that one cannot be said
‘to have enjoyed a symphony’ before one has listened through it. That is,
while I am enjoying the symphony, I cannot claim that I have yet enjoyed
it. This object NP would make enjoying a kinesis, in plain contradiction
with what Aristotle tells us in the Nicomachean Ethics. And if we are
allowed to introduce termini in some cases, why not here? Ackrill con-
cluded that Aristotle’s grammatical test is flawed. However, his argu-
ments presuppose that ‘enjoy’ is an adequate translation of hēdesthai,
which is not self-evident. If hēdesthai is a stative verb, an object will not

make the VP telic. But anyway, we can avoid such problems by not sup-
plying objects or prepositional phrases for Aristotle’s verbs. After all,
they are not in the text.
We summarize Kenny’s and Aristotle’s tests in the following:
Kenny’s test:
Performance verbs: A is f-ing entails A has not f-ed.
e.g. John is building his house entails John has not
built his house.
PRES.PROG. entails not-PFCT.
Activity verbs: A is f-ing entails A has f-ed.
e.g. Mary is walking entails Mary has walked.
PRES.PROG. entails PFCT.
Aristotle’s test:
Kineseis: oud’ hugiazetai kai hugiastai
For it is not true that at the same time we are being
cured and have been cured.
PRES. entails not-PFCT.
Energeiai: eu zēi kai eu ezēken hama
At the same time we are living well and have lived
well.
PRES. entails PFCT.
One di¤erence between Kenny and Aristotle springs to our eyes at once.
Kenny’s test uses the present progressive, and so it cannot be applied to
state predications. Greek, of course, has no progressive and we cannot
therefore exclude that Aristotle’s test applies to states. It will be impor-
tant to have this in mind, although I shall argue that the main di¤erence
between the two tests lies in the semantics of the perfect in English and
Greek.
The semantics of the Greek perfect was quite recently examined by
Gerö and von Stechow (2002), from whom we have drawn many insights.
However, our need for comparing the English and the Greek perfect has
led us to focus on other aspects, inspired by Parsons’ (1990) account of
the English perfect on the basis of his notion of resultant state. Especially
with regard to the Greek perfect in classical times, we have deviated from
Gerö and von Stechow.
3. The early Greek perfect — general considerations
There seems to be general agreement that the Greek perfect expresses the
present existence of a state resulting from a past event. Unfortunately,

394 D. Haug
this is not very precise. We would like to know exactly what kind of state
is meant. We will discuss this question later; for the moment, we would
only note that such resultant states are not necessarily to be identified
with states in the Kenny-Vendler taxonomy. This must be kept in mind
during our discussion of the other question: does the Greek perfect pres-
ent a state resulting from some past event or not?
In some cases it is clear that the state results from a past event. The
perfect tethnēke ‘he is dead’ is clearly a result of a past event ‘he died,’
which can be expressed by the aorist (perfective past) ethane. This event
can again be seen as including an activity subevent ‘he was dying’ ex-
pressed by the imperfect ethnēiske. The verbs which have such a relation-
ship between imperfect — aorist — perfect were called action-event-state
verbs by Lyons (1967: 117¤.). Lyon’s insight is important, but from a
terminological point of view, this use of the term ‘‘event’’ does not fit into
our scheme, and in the following we shall refer to the coming about of a
new state through an event as the culmination of that event. In this, we
are following Parsons’ (1990) terminology, but as we shall see in the last
section, this is not entirely unproblematic.
There are some verbs for which this relationship never holds. Such
verbs have a so-called intensive or abnormal perfect. We can give as an
example the verb gēthein ‘be happy.’ The present gēthei means ‘he is
happy,’ the aorist egēthēse ‘he became happy,’ and the perfect gegēthe
means ‘he is happy.’ We see the reasons for the somewhat unhelpful
labels ‘‘abnormal’’ or ‘‘intensive’’ perfect. The perfect tense is abnormal
in that it seems to have the same meaning as the present. Some scholars
have felt that this cannot be the case, and so they have postulated that the
perfect is somehow more intensive than the present. But this cannot be
safely read out of the texts. As we do not have ancient Greek informants,
we shall probably never know the exact nature of the semantic di¤erence
between the perfect and the present in such cases, although it seems prob-
able that there is one.
Our problem here, however, is whether the perfect gegēthe ‘he is happy’
can be seen as the result of a former action. Clearly, it would be possible
to say that it means ‘I have become happy and now I am happy.’ Rui-
pérez (1982) denies this, however, on the grounds that gēthein means ‘be
happy’ and not ‘become happy.’ To this, one would reply that the aorist
egēthēse does mean ‘become happy.’ Ruipérez denies such an analysis,
but to my mind his arguments are not convincing. They are mainly
morphological: he says that many verbs with an abnormal perfect do not
have an aorist, and that the morphological markers of the aorist and the
perfect are in any case quite di¤erent. But these morphological arguments
cannot disprove that there is a semantic relationship between the aorist

and the perfect. In fact, I will argue that there is a fundamental relation-
ship between the perfect and the perfective (aorist) aspect. The obvious
advantage of such an analysis is that it makes it possible to give a unified
account of the semantics of the Greek perfect, and this is what we would
expect in such a highly marked form. The ‘‘abnormal’’ and the ‘‘normal’’
perfect turn out to be derived semantically in the same way; for some
verbs, however, this gives rise to a near-synonomy of the present and the
perfect forms. These doublets could be pragmatically exploited to express
di¤erences whose exact nature will probably remain obscure to us.
A priori, then, it seems plausible to see a relationship between the se-
mantics of the aorist and of the perfect. The texts also seem to support
such a semantic relationship between the aorist and the perfect. This can
be seen readily with the verb thnēskein: in principle, the imperfective could
be used of a dying person who nevertheless survived. If the aorist is used,
however, the person died irrevocably. And the perfect, of course, refers to
the state resulting from this culminated event expressed by the aorist. It
does not mean ‘having had a near-death experience.’
Another example of this semantic relationship can be found in the verb
bouleuō in its standard sense, that is, excluding the special meaning ‘to
be a member of the boulē (council).’ According to the Liddell and Scott
(1996) lexicon, it means ‘‘ ‘take counsel,’ ‘deliberate,’ in past tenses ‘de-
termine’ or ‘resolve after deliberation’.’’ But saying that the meaning
‘determine’ or ‘resolve after deliberation’ belongs to the past tenses is
plainly wrong and shows a disregard for aspectual issues in the Greek
lexicographical tradition. Naturally, it is the aorist (the perfective past),
and — in most cases at least — not the imperfect, that has the meaning
‘determine,’ ‘resolve after deliberation’ as is noted in the Diccionario
Griego-Español (Rodrı́guez Adrados 1980). In other words, the aorist
presents an event that culminated. But what about the perfect?
We have a particularly nice example of its use in Plato’s Crito 46A.
Crito tells Socrates about the plan for his escape and concludes:
(3) oude bouleuesthai eti hōra alla bebouleusthai
not deliberatePRES:INF: still time but deliberatePFCT:INF:
The meaning cannot be: this is no longer the time for deliberating, but
for having deliberated. The perfect bebouleusthai must have the meaning
‘having made a decision,’ or more precisely ‘be in the state of having
made a decision.’ And this seems to be the meaning of bebouleusthai in all
its classical occurrences: it refers to the consequent state of the culminated
event ebouleusa and not the past activity ebouleuon ‘was discussing.’
We therefore espouse the view that the perfect denotes a present state
resulting from a former event that can be expressed by the VP in the

396 D. Haug
aorist. The perfect, therefore, has a double reference: a present state and a
past event that culminated. But, as we would expect in such situations,
pragmatic factors can put emphasis on the state or on the event. This is a
question that we will not pursue further here. Su‰ce it to say that in early
Greek, the notion of state seems to be much more important than the
preceding event.
Furthermore, as Wackernagel (1904) recognized in his classical study,
the perfect is often intransitive in Homer: this is so because, in most cases,
it refers to a state of the grammatical subject, resulting from some former
event. For example, the present histēmi is transitive and means ‘I make to
stand,’ whereas the perfect hestēka is intransitive and has the meaning
‘I stand,’ that is ‘I have made myself to stand and stand now,’ although
in this case there seems to be almost no emphasis on the past action.
However, the Greek perfect is not necessarily intransitive: many verbs
can take an object and nevertheless refer to an event which gives rise to a
state of the grammatical subject. Despite claims to the contrary in the
post-Wackernagelian tradition, this was obviously so even in the oldest
reconstructable stage of Indo-European: the obviously archaic formation
*woyd-H2 e (perfect from the root *weyd- ‘to see’) means ‘I know’ and is
of course transitive, but the state expressed is nevertheless a state of the
subject. Another example attested in Greek is the verb ‘to learn,’ Greek
manthanō. The perfect memathēka is of course transitive, but it neverthe-
less expresses a state of the subject, namely the state of having learned
something.
Furthermore, it is essential to the truth-conditions of the Greek per-
fect that the state holds at utterance time. This is quite di¤erent from the
English perfect. The notion of resultant state is relevant to the English
perfect also (at least in theories other than the extended now-theory, to
which we will return later), in that it asserts of the subject that it has
what Carlota Smith (1997: 107¤.) calls the participant property. In
Smith’s analysis, the sentence ‘Elaine has danced with Bill’ asserts of
Elaine that she has the property of having danced with Bill. This is in
some way a state resulting from her dancing with Bill. There is therefore a
felicity condition on the use of the perfect in English. The classical exam-
ple is ‘Einstein has lived in Princeton,’ which is odd when uttered after
Einstein’s death; he can no longer be ascribed the participant property.
But this felicity condition is utterly di¤erent from the truth conditions
imposed by the Greek perfect. Consider the corresponding Greek
sentence:
(4) Aristotelēs Athēnas ōikēke

AristotleNOM:SG: AthensACC:PL: inhabitPFCT:3:SG:

This sentence is simply false if uttered at a time when Aristotle no longer

lived in Athens. The di¤erence is, of course, that the notion of state in-
herent in the English perfect in its experiential reading is di¤erent from
the state to which a Greek perfect refers. This di¤erence seems in fact to
be crucial, and we will return to it below. But we can at once note that
this use of the perfect is explainable in terms of the relation between the
perfect and the aorist: the aorist from this verb, ōikēsa, does in fact mean
‘to settle.’ Clearly, we can paraphrase the meaning of (4) as ‘Aristotle has
settled in Athens and the consequent state of this past event still holds.’
This is not di¤erent from the meaning of the present, except that there is
a reference to the beginning of the state. The sentence (4) was made up to
parallel the English example, but the fact that the perfect of oikeō refers
to the beginning of the state can be seen in the texts. In Sophocles’ play
Electra (1101), Orestes asks where Aigisthus lives using the perfect of this
verb. Anyone who knows the play will see that it is central to Orestes’
concerns that he refers to the beginning of the state; Orestes is seeking
Aigisthus because Aigisthus has taken his father’s place and now lives in
his palace. Here, the reference to the beginning of the event is clear, but
the emphasis is naturally on the present state.
Given the fact that the early Greek perfect is essentially intransitive
and that the notion of state is all-important, it is tempting to conclude
that it has less in common with the category perfect than with the cate-
gory which Östen Dahl (1985: 133¤.), following Nedjalkov and others,
labels ‘‘resultative.’’ Nedjalkov in fact uses two terms which seem relevant
for the understanding of the Greek perfect, namely stative and resultative.
The di¤erence is defined as follows (Nedjalkov 1988: 6): ‘‘the stative ex-
presses a state of a thing without any implication of its origin, while the
resultative expresses both a state and the preceding action it has resulted
from.’’ It is notable that in many languages there is wavering between
the stative and the resultative meaning: that is, the same form can be used
to denote a state, with or without reference to the event that brought it
about. This is reminiscent of the situation in Greek: the reference to a
past event can often be rather weak or even nonexistent.
Both the stative and the resultative, then, refer to a state, and in this
they di¤er from the perfect, which primarily refers to a past event. For
the time being, we uphold that the notion of state is relevant to the use of
the perfect also — cf. the participant property — but it is much weaker
than the state to which statives and resultatives refer. This can be seen
from the test proposed by Dahl (1985: 134): an adverb like ‘still’ like in ‘I
am still reading Proust’ implies a state-of-a¤airs and indicates the lack of
a di¤erence between the state of a¤airs expressed in the proposition, and
the actual one. This analysis will explain why ‘still’ is incompatible with

398 D. Haug
perfects (which primarily refer to a past event) like in the ungrammatical

‘*I have still been frightened,’ but good with resultatives, like the Greek
perfect in the Iliad 21.206:
(5) hoi r’eti par potamon pephobēato dinēenta
they still along-the-river put-to-flight3:PL:MED:PFCT: whirling
‘They were still fleeing along the whirling river.’
The perfect expresses the resultant state of having been put to flight, and
the adverb eti ‘still’ can access this state.
Dahl (1985: 134¤.) further claims that resultatives are characterized by
the fact that they are used of results in a narrow sense, whereas the per-
fect of result allows for a less strict conception of resulting state — which
is why its use shades o¤ into the experiential perfect. It follows from this
that resultative constructions can only be formed from verbs whose se-
mantics involves change of some kind. In general, resultative construc-
tions tend to be highly lexically restricted. There also seems to be a high
correlation between passive voice and resultative constructions.
Now this apparently fits very well with the Homeric perfect. We have
already noted that Homer’s perfect is generally intransitive, and we may
add that fewer verbs have attested perfects in Homer than in later texts.
Its use is restricted to certain types of verbs: besides a peculiar use of the
perfect with noise verbs, we mostly find verbs of change, whether mental
or physical, and motion verbs. It is therefore tempting to analyze the
Greek perfect as a resultative, as Gerö and von Stechow do. And al-
though we shall do so in the following, there is really no point in chang-
ing a well-established terminology. For this reason, we shall continue to
speak of the ‘‘Greek perfect,’’ although this may give rise to apparent
absurdities like ‘the Greek perfect is a resultative, and not a perfect.’
4. The English and the Homeric Greek perfect
In order to bring out the di¤erence between the semantics of the English
and the Greek perfect, we will focus on Parsons’ (1990) distinction be-
tween resultant state and target state, which is often exploited in formal
semantic work on resultatives (e.g. Kratzer 2000). The resultant state and
the target state are defined as follows:
For every event e that culminates, there is a corresponding state that holds forever
after. This is ‘‘the state of e’s having culminated,’’ which I call the ‘‘Resultant
state of e,’’ or ‘‘e’s R-state.’’ If Mary eats lunch, then there is a state that holds
forever after: The state of Mary’s having eaten lunch. The notion of resultant
state is clearly subject to the defining principle

e’s R-state holds at t 1 e culminates at some time at or before t

It is important not to identify the Resultant-state of an event with its ‘target state.’
If I throw a ball onto the roof, the target state of this event is the ball’s being on
the roof, a state that may or may not last for a long time. What I am calling the
Resultant-state is di¤erent; it is the state of my having thrown the ball onto the
roof, and it is a state that cannot cease holding at some later time (Parsons 1990:
234f.).
Using his notion of resultant state, Parsons (1990: 236) is able to for-
malize the semantics of the English perfect as in the following example
(although he does not spell it out in predicate calculus notation):
(6) Mary has eaten the apple
be (eat (e)5Agent (e, Mary)5Theme (e, the apple)
5Hold (R(e), now))
‘There is an event e such that e is an eating-event and Mary is the
agent of e and the apple is the theme of e and the resultant state of
e holds now (at utterance time).’
R is to be interpreted as a function from eventualities to eventualities
which assigns each event e that culminates its resultant state. Parsons re-
stricts his notion of R-state to events that culminate because he analyzes
processes (Vendler’s activities) as homogenous compositions of events
that do culminate. We will see in the final section that this perhaps coun-
terintuitive analysis does have some justification, at least in a modified
form.
Parsons extends his analysis to states. He a‰rms that ‘‘s’s R-state holds
at t 1 the period of time for which s holds terminates at or before t.’’ In
other words, if Mary is sick, then there is an R-state, the state of Mary’s
being sick having terminated, expressed by ‘Mary has been sick.’ How-
ever, this definition of R-states of states does not seem to be correct. The
natural interpretation of ‘Mary has been sick’ is of course that she no
longer is, but the possibility of extensions like ‘for two weeks now’ sug-
gests that this is only an implicature. The perfect seems also to allow an
open reading. This can be accounted for if we allow that the consequent
state of a state holds from the moment the state holds (inclusive or ex-
clusive); that is,
s’s R-state holds at t 1 there is a time t 0 < t (or at) at which s
holds
Thus, s’s R-state continues to hold even if s itself no longer does. In this
way ‘Mary is sick’ entails ‘Mary has been sick,’ but there is no entailment
from ‘Mary has been sick’ to either ‘Mary is sick’ or its negation.

400 D. Haug
Parsons’s analysis is clearly simplified and it leaves important questions

unanswered, especially from a strictly compositional point of view. What
remains unanswered, for example, is how the di¤erent R-states to which
‘Mary has eaten apples’ and ‘Mary has eaten the apples’ refer can be
traced to the di¤erence between the bare plural and the plural with the
definite article. To answer this question, a much more refined analysis
along the lines of Krifka (1998, and other related work) or Verkuyl (1993)
is needed. For our present purposes, however, we may abstract from this
problem. Parsons’ analysis gives us all we need for explaining Kenny’s
test. For if we accept that the English perfect states that a resultant state
as defined above holds at utterance time, we can clearly predict the en-
tailments from Kenny’s test.
We may now attempt an analysis of the Homeric perfect along the
same lines. As a resultative, we expect it to occur mainly with telic VPs
and this seems to be the case, as noted above. It is convenient to start our
analysis with the motion verbs. Consider the following example (Iliad
21.80¤.; Gerö and von Stechow 2002: 16):
(7) ēōs de moi estin hēde duōdekatē hot’ es

morningNOM: and IDAT: bePRES:3:SG: this twelfthNOM: that to
Ilion eilēloutha
TroyACC: goPFCT:1:SG:
‘This is for me the tweltfh morning that5 I am in Troy.’
The relative sentence es Ilion eilēloutha can plausibly be analyzed in the

following way:
be (elthein (e)5Agent (e, 1.sg.)5To (e, Ilion)5Hold (T(e), now))

‘There is an event e such that e is an event of going, and the speaker
is the agent of e and Ilion is the goal of e and the T-state of e holds
now (at utterance time).’
This is identical with Parsons’ analysis of the English perfect, except that
it uses the notion of target state instead of resultant state. This reflects an
important di¤erence between the truth-conditions of the Greek and the
English perfect: in this particular case, as pointed out by Comrie (1976:
59), English can make a di¤erence between ‘I have gone to Troy’ (re-
sultative) and ‘I have been to Troy’ (experiential), but in general, as Car-
lota Smith (1997: 108) says: ‘‘if the situation involves change of state, the
resultant state (i.e. Parsons’ target state) need not obtain at reference
time.’’ So it seems that the main di¤erence between the English and the
Greek perfect is that the former involves a resultant state and the latter a
target state.

Such an analysis is a bit too simple, since it ignores the fact that in
Greek, the target state is open for adverbial modification. As ancient
Greek clearly distinguishes between illatival, allatival, and locatival prep-
ositional complements, we can find evidence of this in the use of the per-
fect with motion verbs. In the following example, the use of the dative
with the preposition amphi presupposes a locative meaning for the prep-
osition phrase:
(8) amph’ autōi bebamen
around himDAT:SG: walkedPFCT:1:PL:
‘We stand around him’, that is, ‘We have walked and now stand in
positions around him.’
This can be analyzed as:
be (walk (e)5Agent (e, 1.pl.)5Hold (T(e), now)
5Around (T(e), him)
This is quite di¤erent from the English perfect where an adverb can only
modify the event. ‘We have walked around him’ can only be interpreted
as to mean that there was a walking event by us around him and that the
resultant state of this event holds now. It clearly does not mean that there
was a walking event by us and that the resultant state of this event holds
around him. We will not go further into this di¤erence; but what seems
clear is that Parsons’ R-state, whatever it really is, does not allow for
adverbial modification, whereas T-states do. Of course, it is tempting to
conclude from this that the semantics of the English perfect involves no
state at all and that an extended now-analysis (henceforth: XN-analysis)
should be preferred. On this analysis, ‘‘the perfect serves to locate an
event within a period of time that began in the past and extends up to the
present moment’’ (Dowty 1979: 341). For the early Greek perfect, how-
ever, the XN-analysis is excluded, since it involves no notion of state to
which the prepositional phrase in (8) could apply.
5. Target state in Greek
5.1. ‘‘Default aktionsart’’
It is well known that in languages with no overt aspectual morphology,

telic predicates tend to be understood perfectively and atelic predicates
imperfectively. Consider the following German examples from Bohne-
meyer and Swift (2001), where a formal analysis of the phenomenon in
terms of a default aspect-operator is o¤ered:

402 D. Haug
(9) Als ich Marys Büro betrat, schrieb sie an einem Brief.
When I Mary’s o‰ce entered wrote she at a letter.
(10) Als ich Marys Büro betrat, schrieb sie einen Brief.
When I Mary’s o‰ce entered wrote she a letter.
In (9) one understands that the writing event was going on during the
entering event, that is, the main clause is understood imperfectively. Such
an interpretation is possible in (10) also. However, in (10), it is more
natural to assume that the onset of the writing event coincided with the
entering, that is, the main clause is understood perfectively. These inter-
pretations can be shown to be no more than implicatures, but there is
clearly a connection between telicity and aspect. This connection also
holds in the opposite direction, in what may be labelled a ‘‘default ak-
tionsart’’ phenomenon. This is true, for example, in Russian where aspect
is morphologically marked, but where there are no articles, which means
that some noun phrases can be ambiguous between count and mass in-
terpretation. In such cases, the perfective aspect selects for the interpreta-
tion of the object NP as count noun:
(11) Ivan pil pivo
Ivan drinkIMPF:PAST beerACC:
(12) Ivan vypil pivo
Ivan drinkPFV:PAST beerACC:
In (12), pivo is most naturally understood as a count noun6 so that the
predicate as a whole is telic, whereas both interpretations are possible in
(11).
A similar phenomenon no doubt lies behind the Greek opposition be-
tween ebouleuon ‘they deliberated’ and ebouleusan ‘they decided’ as dis-
cussed above. As we concluded in that section, such a ‘‘coercion’’ e¤ect
applies to the perfect as well, and it clearly must be taken into account in
an analysis of the target state to which it refers.
5.2. Target state from telic VPs
With telic VPs, adopting Dowty’s (1979) decompositional analysis, it is

easy to define the target state of a telic VP (BECOME f) as f. Adopting
Dowty’s semantics for BECOME f (Dowty 1979: 140¤.), we see at once
that the target state of an event holds once the event has culminated.
There is one further complication, however, namely that the Greek per-
fect expresses a state of the subject and thus cannot readily combine
with externally caused change-of-state verbs (i.e. CAUSE BECOME

verbs). For example, there is little evidence that the root *g wh en- ‘kill’ —
although obviously telic — could form a perfect in Indo-European. But in
Greek, there is a tendency to ‘‘build a conjugation’’ that will be discussed
below. This means that in the end, all verbal roots are given a perfect. We
find three strategies to form perfects from externally caused change-of-
state verbs. We will discuss the two first here, and the third in connection
with the perfect of activities.
First, the perfect can interact with the argument structure of the verb:
the verb (ap-)ollumi is transitive and regularly means ‘ruin, destroy.’ Fol-
lowing McKoon and Macfarland (2000: 834), we can give its meaning as
((a) CAUSE (BECOME (x (be ruined)))). The perfect olōla, however, is
intransitive and regularly means ‘I have perished, I am dead, ruined, etc.’
Note that there is no implication that the subject brought about its own
ruin; we cannot assume that the meaning is ((a) CAUSE (BECOME (a
(be ruined)))).
The second strategy is essentially the same, but with added medio-
passive morphology on the verb. It seems certain that the IE perfect did
not have medio-passive forms, and they are still rare in Homer. However,
examples can be found like outaō ‘wound’ ((a) CAUSE (BECOME (x
(be wounded)))), which has a medial perfect outasmai ‘I am wounded.’ As
noted, the e¤ect is about the same, but in this case there is explicit medio-
passive morphology on the verb.
These two phenomena are in many ways reminiscent of the anticau-
sative alternation, and can probably be analyzed in the same way (see,
e.g., Sæbø 2001 with references). We will not pursue the problem here,
since it is not directly relevant for the analysis of Aristotle’s test. We may
safely assume that Aristotle did not intend his test to apply to cases where
the perfect interacts with the argument structure, since an entailment like
ou gar hama ollusi kai olōle (‘it is not true that at the same time a thing
is destroying and is destroyed’) is obviously and trivially false. We will
therefore ignore this problem and keep to the simple assumption that the
perfect of a telic VP BECOME f asserts that the target state f of this
event holds.
5.3. Target state from stative VPs
This analysis can furthermore be directly extended to states, if we admit

that the perfect of state-VPs first demands a perfective reading and then
selects for the ingressive one.7 This is essentially the analysis adapted
above; ōikēka, the perfect from oikeō ‘live’ a‰rms that the target state of
a past event of settling (BECOME live at) holds at present. In this case, it

404 D. Haug
is utterly implausible that the perfect should have an intensive force. In

other cases too, where such an interpretation is a priori possible (as with
gētheō ‘be happy’), no such di¤erence can be safely read out of the texts.
The category ‘‘intensive perfect’’ seems to be a creation of philologists
startled by the apparent synonymy of the perfect and the present in such
cases. The ‘‘intensive perfect’’ analysis is also problematic on diachronic
grounds, as Gerö and von Stechow (2002) — themselves partisans of such
an analysis — admit: ‘‘one wonders by which historical coincidence two
very di¤erent meanings, intensity and resultativity, were associated to the
same morphology.’’
5.4. Target state from activity VPs
At first, we should note that the so-called ‘‘intensive perfect’’ is not lim-
ited to stative VPs; examples can also be found from dynamic VPs. This
is particularly common with noise-verbs, such as kekraga ‘I shout,’ which
is very hard to distinguish from the present krazō. These can probably be
analyzed along the same lines as the corresponding stative VPs.
In principle, events that fall under activity VPs do not give rise to a tar-
get state in any obvious way, and more often than not, they do not have
perfect forms at all in Homer. There is one notable exception, namely the
motion verbs. We have already seen that such verbs can appear in the
perfect with a locatival prepositional phrase. Moreover, such perfects can
appear without any prepositional phrase, but they still imply a preceding,
culminated — and not terminated — motion event. Consider the fol-
lowing example (Iliad 15.90):
(13) Hērē, tipte bebēkas;

HeraVOC: why walkPFCT:2:SG:
Translators give ‘Hera, why are you here?’ or ‘Hera, why have you come?’
and this is obviously the right translation: tipte bebēkas cannot mean
‘Why have you been walking?’ We clearly have a case of ‘‘default ak-
tionsart.’’ Default aspect, as discussed briefly above, is an implicature
that may be cancelled by other factors; it would be interesting to know
whether this is so for default aktionsart too. However, the materials allow
for no such interpretation — there seem to be no cases of the perfect from
a motion verb referring to the target state of a past event which did not
culminate.8 Indeed such an event would not at all give rise to a target
state, but only a resultant state. While, as we will see, there are indeed
Greek perfects referring to something like a resultant state, this never

seems to happen with motion verbs, where it was too easy to impose a
telic reading.
With other activity verbs, however, a telic reading could not so easily
be imposed, and such perfects are exceedingly rare in Homer. There are,
however, a couple of interesting examples: dakruō ‘to cry’ and kamnō
‘to work’ do form perfects in Homer, and these have the meanings ‘to be
tear-stained’ and ‘to be tired.’ These examples are interesting because they
are exactly paralleled in other languages: Nedjalkov (1988: 35f.) cites
Nivkh and Evenki resultatives from the verb ‘to cry’ with the meaning ‘to
be tear-stained,’ and from Hausa, a resultative from the verb ‘to work’
which means ‘to be tired from work.’ It seems that when a state occurs
frequently enough as a consequence of some action described by an atelic
predicate, this state can be expressed through what Nedjalkov labels a
quasi-resultative. We will see more Greek examples when we turn to the
post-Homeric period.
6. The post-homeric development
The development of the verbal system from Homer and down to classical
times has been described by Chantraine as one of ‘‘building a conjuga-
tion,’’ and the term seems appropriate. Greek had inherited from Indo-
European a system with quite independent verbal stems, in many cases
formed from di¤erent roots. A mere glimpse at the Lexikon der Indo-
germanischen Verben (Rix 2001) gives an impression of the extent of
suppletivism and the independence of the aspect stems in Indo-European.
But within the history of the Greek language, the verbal system tends to
evolve into a system where verbs are lexical unities that can be conjugated
through the di¤erent categories. We will now look at the consequences
this has for the meaning of the perfect.
The first and obvious conclusion to draw is that when all verbs are
given a perfect, the so-called quasi-resultatives multiply. We have already
seen that such quasi-resultatives denote states which are hard to formal-
ize. In fact, they often seem to come close to Parsons’ resultant state. We
will consider a few such examples where the Greek perfect seems to take
on a meaning quite close to the English perfect. In fact, such a develop-
ment from a strict resultative to a perfect like the English one seems to be
quite a common feature in the semantic evolution of languages. In Greek,
with its extraordinary diachronic depth, we can observe this evolution as it
proceeds, and this gives us a unique opportunity to see how such a change
comes about.

406 D. Haug
After the study of the examples which seemingly must be analyzed in

terms of Parsons’ resultant state, we will point to some oft-quoted di‰-
culties with this notion, leading up to a discussion of Gerö and von Ste-
chow’s analysis of the classical Greek perfect within an XN-approach.
We will argue that the similarity of the resultant state analysis and the
XN-theory in the case of atelic and stative predications constitutes exactly
the link which makes the semantic transition from resultative to perfect
possible.
6.1. The perfect with atelic VPs
We have already seen some such cases in the Homeric perfects kekmēka
and dedakrumai. These perfects clearly denote states, although these states
are idiosyncratically derived and not always predictable from the mean-
ing of the base verb. Such verbs can still be found in classical Greek.
Consider first the verb tiktō ‘to beget.’ In the present and the aorist, this
verb is of course transitive, taking the child as an object. The perfect
tetoka, however, is intransitive and carries the meaning ‘be a mother’ or
‘be in the puerperal state,’ as in the following example from Xenophon
(Cyn. 5.13):
(14) ta men tetoke, ta de tiktei, ta de

either begetPFCT:3:SG: or begetPRES:3:SG: or
kuei
be-pregnantPRES:3:SG:
‘(The hare is so prolific, that) she is either in the puerperal state or
giving birth or pregnant.’
Although, linguistically speaking, being in the puerperal state is not a

result of begetting, world knowledge tells us that this is the way things
normally are, and this is enough to justify a quasi-resultative. It is hard to
generalize on (not to mention formalize) the semantic derivation of such
states; they must be specified in the lexicon. However, some generaliza-
tions are possible. Quite often, for example, they refer to the realm of re-
sponsibility. A particularly nice example (Sophocles, Antigone 442f.) is
analyzed by Rijksbaron (1994: 35):
(15) phēs ē katarnēi mē dedrakenai tade?

admit2:SG:PRES: or deny2:SG:PRES: (not) doINF:PFCT: thisACC:PL:
kai phēmi drasai kouk aparnoumai to mē.
and admit1:SG:PRES: doINF:AOR: and not deny1:SG:PRES: (not)

Creon asks Antigone phēs ē katarnēi mē dedrakenai tade with draō ‘to do’
in the perfect: ‘do you admit or do you deny that you are responsible for
these actions?’ Antigone aptly answers in the a‰rmative, but with the
verb in the aorist: she admits to having done what Creon says, but im-
plicitly, by using the aorist and not the perfect, she denies any consequent
state of guilt.
(14) quite clearly involves reference to a state which goes beyond a
mere current relevance or a participant property. In (15), this is already
less clear, although the opposition between the perfect and the aorist does
seem to involve more than current relevance. There are, however, cases
where the perfect refers to no more than Parsons’ resultant state. Many
such examples are discussed in Gerö and von Stechow (2002), from whom
we cite the following (Plato Apology 17c):
(16) di’ hōnper eiōtha legein kai en agorāi epi tōn trapezōn,
(the words) by which I am accustomed to speak also in the market
at the banker’s tables
hina humōn polloi akēkoasi
where youGEN:PL: manyNOM:PL: hearPFCT:3:PL:
The last relative clause must be translated ‘‘where many of you have
heard me,’’ and this seems to come quite close to the English experiential
perfect, which can be analyzed in terms of Parsons’ resultant state or
within an XN-approach. We will return to the question as to which of
these should be preferred, but first we will have a look at the use of the
perfect with telic VPs. It seems that the di‰culty of constructing any rea-
sonable target state for many atelic VPs, combined with the general ten-
dency to build a conjugation and conjugate all verbs through all tenses,
led to the perfect of atelic verbs referring to resultant states. But for telic
VPs, there is in general no problem in defining a target state, and this
made it possible for the perfect to retain its old resultative force in such
cases, as we shall see.
6.2. The perfect with telic VPs
Telicity in this connection must be somewhat delimited, since the Greek

perfect orginally could only denote a state of the subject. It is controver-
sial whether this is still so in classical Greek; Wackernagel (1904) and
Chantraine (1927: 122) claimed to have found object resultatives already
in Pindar (fifth century BC), whereas McKay (1965, 1980) and Ringe
(1984) have doubted this and claim that the first examples appear much
later, in the Christian era. The nuances involved are so fine that we shall

408 D. Haug
probably never get an exact answer. Consider the following example from
Thucydides (5.26.1):
(17) gegraphe de kai tauta
writePFCT:3:SG: and thisACC:PL:N:
ho autos Thoukudidēs Athēnaios
the-same-Thucydides-AthenianNOM:SG:
It is hard to know whether the perfect here expresses the state of this be-
ing written (object resultative) or the state of Thucydides being the author
of this (subject quasi-resultative), although the highly marked sentence-
final position of the subject speaks for the last analysis, which implies that
the predicate is treated as atelic (since it does not give rise to a state of the
subject) and thus given a quasi-resultative interpretation: writing some-
thing is often followed by the state of being an author. We will not pursue
this problem further, but rather concentrate on those telic predicates that
clearly give rise to a state of the subject.
That the perfect in such cases still in classical times refers to a resultant
state and not a target state is shown quite clearly by the verb bainō.
Consider the following example from Euripides (Heraclidae 62, similarly
Sophocles, Oed. Col. 52):
(18) gai’ en hēi bebēkamen
landNOM: in whichDAT:SG: walkedPFCT:1:PL:
The use of the dative with the preposition en implies a locatival force
without any implication of motion. If we translate word for word, we get
the English sentence ‘the land in which we have walked,’ which is natu-
rally understood as an experiential perfect of an activity VP. This is,
however, not the right meaning, as the context makes clear. The intended
meaning is clearly ‘the land (to which we have come and) in which we
now are.’ This means that there must be some state present which can be
modified by the prepositional phrase. We have already seen that this does
not happen with resultant states. It also seems clear that the truth con-
ditions of such perfects as bebēka do indeed demand that the subject is
still at the location towards which the preceding walking event was di-
rected. Only in this way can we explain how it happened that bebēka, by
losing its implication of a preceding event, came to approach the copula
in meaning (see Liddell and Scott 1996: bainō A.I.2).
Further confirmation that the Greek perfect, even in classical times,
cannot be analyzed within a simple resultant state-approach comes from
the fact that ‘‘default aktionsart’’ phenomena are still alive in classical
Greek, as illustrated by examples (3) and (4) above, and also by (18),
where there is no illatival prepositional phrase (although it could argu-

ably be supplied from the locatival phrase). It is furthermore clear that

with telic VPs, it belongs to the truth conditions of the Greek perfect that
the target state holds at present, whereas this is merely an implicature
with the English perfect. We have already seen this with motion verbs,
but it also holds for other telic VPs. For example, on hearing ‘the patient
has woken up,’ we naturally infer that the patient is awake, but this im-
plicature can be cancelled, for example, ‘the patient has woken up occa-
sionally, but always slips back into a coma.’ In classical Greek, however,
as far as one can judge, the perfect egrēgora from egeiromai ‘wake up’
simply means ‘is awake’ — that the target state holds at present is no
mere implicature, as an XN-analysis would predict.
In claiming that the XN-analysis can be applied to the classical Greek
perfect, Gerö and von Stechow seem not to have realized that their ex-
amples are mostly from atelic verbs, whereas the examples they give for
the resultative meaning are from telic verbs. The only possible example
they produce for a telic VP in an XN-use is the following:
(19) ei tis emoi kai Eratosthenei ekhthra pōpote gegenētai

if some IDAT: -and-EratosthenesDAT: enmity ever arisePFCT:3:SG:
which they translate ‘‘(ask yourselves) if any enmity ever arose between
me and Eratosthenes (beside this one).’’ It is probably the adverb pōpote
‘ever’ which led them to render gegenētai by a simple past ‘arose.’ While
it is true that this adverb is unusual with the perfect, we have already seen
that the perfect does allow for event-modifying adverbs; we might thus
translate ‘ever arose and now exists,’ maintaining a strict target-state
analysis.
6.3. The diachronics of the Greek perfect from Homer to classical times
The picture I would like to suggest is the following: in Homer, the per-
fect always referred to a target state. This target state could in most cases
be derived directly from the semantics of the base verb (in resultatives
from telic VPs); in other cases, the connection with the base verb was
looser (as in the quasi-resultatives). However, as the perfect category ex-
panded to be used with almost all verbs, it came to denote a resultant
state with atelic verbs, although its use with telic verbs still denoted a
target state. At this point, it may seem that the perfect has no unitary se-
mantics, as it denotes a target state with telic verbs and a resultant state
with atelic verbs. However, it seems possible to unify these two by ex-
ploiting the notion of event realization (see Bohnemeyer and Swift 2001):

410 D. Haug
An event e denoted by a predicate P is realized at an interval t if and only

if there is a subevent e 0 of e that falls under the predicate P and whose
runtime is included in t. In other words, events that fall under atelic
predicates are realized as soon as they have begun, as long as the interval
considered is large enough to for the event to count as an instance of the
predicate: some strokes of the pen are enough to realize an event falling
under the predicate ‘write.’ Events that fall under telic predicates, how-
ever, are only realized when they have culminated: a letter must be fin-
ished for the event denoted by ‘write a letter’ to be realized.
We could claim, then, that the perfect of a predicate P at this point re-
fers to the state resulting from the event denoted by P (in the perfective
aspect) being realized. As we shall see, this is a bit vague concerning atelic
predicates, since no such state can be clearly defined, but this vagueness
was probably exactly what triggered the further semantic evolution. Per-
fects from stative VPs are ambiguous just as their aorists are. A perfect
based on the ingressive reading of the perfective aspect will be something
like the old ‘intensive perfect’ (and these are rare in classical times),
whereas perfects based on the complexive reading (see note 7) will have
semantics very close to the English perfect with states. The ambiguity
here lies in the aorist: ebasileuse can mean ‘became king’ and ‘was king’
(for a certain period), and the corresponding perfect (which in this case
only appears late) could be based on either of these readings. However,
the ambiguity seems to be lexically resolved: for example, sesigēka (from
sigaō ‘to keep silent’) means ‘the event of my falling silent was realized in
the past and the result still holds,’ whereas akēkoa (from akouō ‘to hear’)
means ‘my hearing was realized in the past and the resultant state still
obtains.’
As one can see from the last example, it is quite unclear what state a
perfect from an atelic predicate refers to. This has often been pointed out
as a di‰culty in discussions of resultant state theories of the English per-
fect: it seems di‰cult to pick out the right state. For telic predicates there
is one especially salient state, since all events that fall under such predi-
cates are bordered at the right by a state, the target state. Even in English,
where the perfect does not explicitly denote the target state, the present
existence of this state is often an implicature, as we have seen. For atelic
predicates, there is no easy way to identify a resultant state: we have cited
Parsons’ definition above and used it throughout this article, but it is clear
that with such a broad notion of resultant state, we come dangerously
close to an indefinite past theory, which means that we cannot explain the
unacceptability of the following sentence (Portner 2000: 12):
(20) *Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing.

And if we, following Carlota Smith, identify the resultant state with the
participant property, it seems hard to account for:
(21) Frege has contributed a lot to my thinking. (Portner 2000: 13)
We will not discuss these problems further, but simply note that the di‰-
culties of indentifying the right resultant state have led many linguists to
reject the resultant state approach in favor of an XN-analysis. It is clear,
however, that both approaches yield about the same truth conditions for
the English perfect. This is easily seen in discussions of the relative merits
of such theories, which always focus on theoretical simplicity and pre-
dictions for rather strained cases. This is by no means unjustified, but it
does show that both theories make the same empirical predictions about
the core meaning of the perfect. Analogously, the ‘‘state of event real-
ized’’ analysis presented here gives at least approximately the same truth
conditions as the XN-analysis for atelic predicates, whereas they di¤er
significantly for telic predicates.
If we now assume that Greek speakers of the classical period inter-
preted the perfect as denoting the state resulting from an event being
realized, we may conjecture that the vagueness of resultant states from
events falling under atelic predicates caused a new XN-interpretation to
evolve in this domain, where the truth conditions remained una¤ected. In
the same way, the perfect with state verbs based on the complexive use of
the aorist (as akēkoa above) can be analyzed in an XN-interpretation.
Both of these changes can be understood as cases of Andersen’s (1973)
abductive change: the speaker abduces a new grammar which yields the
same output. However, when this semantic interpretation, by deductive
innovation, was transferred to telic VPs, the truth conditions changed
radically and the Greek perfect became a real perfect and no longer a re-
sultative. This was clearly the case in post-classical Greek, and it is pos-
sibly underway in classical times, if Gerö and von Stechow’s inter-
pretation of (19) is correct. Later, and outside the scope of this article
(but see Gerö and von Stechow 2002), the perfect fell together with the
aorist, as also happened with the French passé composé. In this way, a
combination of the resultant state theory and the XN-theory allows us to
explain the typologically very common evolution of resultatives into per-
fects. This evolution runs counter to the principle of ‘‘strengthening of
implicatures’’ that is often observed in semantic evolution, since in the use
with telic VPs, the present existence of the target state is weakened from a
truth condition to an implicature. The driving force behind this evolu-
tion seems to be the desire to avoid lexical restriction of a grammatical
morpheme.

412 D. Haug
7. Aristotle once again
Let us now return to Aristotle’s test: it is clear that accomplishments and

achievements pass his kinesis-test. For the perfect of such a VP to be true,
the event must have been realized in the past, and for events which fall
under telic predicates, this means that they must have culminated. In this
case, the present tense VP is no longer true. So, telic situation types
clearly belong to the category of kineseis, and this also seems to be the
common opinion of scholars.
States are also no problem; we have seen that the perfect of state verbs
in early Greek is often identical with the meaning of the present; thus the
entailments of Aristotle’s energeia-test clearly go through. In classical
Greek, there is possibly a tendency to form experiential perfects (i.e. per-
fects based on the complexive use of the perfective aspect), but this does
not a¤ect the entailments. Once the present tense state VP can be af-
firmed, the state must also have held in the past.
However, it seems that activities have much as unsure a place within
the Aristotelian classification as within a modern ontology of states and
events (see, e.g., Smith 1999), a problem that we will return to. Never-
theless, a more complete understanding of the semantics of the Greek
perfect enables us to understand his test better. It is quite clear that Aris-
totle, in many cases, views what we would classify as an activity-VP as an
incomplete description of an accomplishment. It is obvious that bainō eis
Athēnas excludes bebēka eis Athēnas, because if I am walking to Athens,
I have not yet reached the state of having walked to Athens and being
there. But we can also see why bainō precludes bebēka, even when there is
no goal expressed, because — by the phenomenon of default aktionsart
— the perfect imposes a telic reading by supplying such a goal. bebēka, as
opposed to the English perfect of the verb ‘to walk’ simply cannot mean
‘I have done a bit of walking’ — one has to understand a goal, as in our
Iliad example (13). Such an implication of a goal must also lie behind the
classical use of bebēka as almost a copula. Default aktionsart also applies
to verbs like ‘to thin’ (iskhnainō) and ‘to learn’ (manthanō). To be telic,
such verbs must presuppose a telos in the form of a definite state of thin-
ness and something being learned, respectively.
But are we not then faced with the di‰culty noted by Ackrill, namely
that we do not know where we should supply such complements and
where we should not? No, because it is not we who are supplying the
complement, the telic reading is imposed by the use of the perfect with
such activities. With states, however, the situation is di¤erent, because
they cannot be made telic by supplying an object. Indeed a verbal object
does not limit a state in the way that it limits events. Obviously, the ob-

ject of my seeing does not limit my seeing in the same way that the object
of my walking limits my walking. As Aristotle himself says, in the
Nicomachean Ethics, 1174b 5–6, the whither and whence — the termini
— constitute the form of kineseis, whereas enjoying and other energeiai
seems to be complete at any moment. In interpreting Aristotle’s test,
nothing is to be supplied by us; the use of the perfect by itself supplies
what there is, so there are indeed no presupposed objects or other com-
plements to be supplied in Aristotle’s text.
Following this principle, it is clear that we must interpret hēdesthai,
claimed by Aristotle to be an energeia, as a state which cannot be limited
by an object. Ackrill may be right to argue that while we are enjoying the
symphony, we cannot yet be said to have enjoyed it, but this depends on
viewing the English verb ‘enjoying’ as an activity, and is no objection to
Aristotle’s test. If we conceive of hēdesthai qua energeia as an activity,
this would make Aristotle’s test fail; but we make a presupposition which
is not necessary, and it is clearly preferable to have an interpretation
which makes Aristotle’s grammatical test a viable one. If we take the
semantics of the Greek perfect into account, it is possible — without un-
necessary presuppositions — to interpret the test as a grammatically cor-
rect one, bringing out interesting properties of the Greek perfect.
Is the test also ontologically correct? Strictly speaking, it is not. There
are indeed some activities which would pass Aristotle’s energeia-tests,
namely those that cannot easily be given a telic interpretation, that is,
such inergatives as ‘scream,’ ‘cry,’ etc. The unsure position of activities
in Aristotle’s taxonomy and the fact that it cuts through what we see as
a homogenous class ‘activities’ seem to derive from a supposition which
is also commonly found in modern literature on aspect and aktionsart,
namely that di¤erences brought out by linguistic tests necessarily define
ontological categories. This is clearly a presupposition of Aristotle’s, and
the corresponding view that the Vendler classes are ontological categories
which divide events into mutually exclusive classes is found in modern
semantics (see, e.g., Mourelatos 1978; Bach 1986 and Smith 1999 —
generally all talk of ‘‘telic events’’ presupposes such a view). But this
seems to be contradicted by the fact that the telic predicate ‘Mary walked
to school’ and the atelic predicate ‘Mary walked’ can be made true by
one and the same event (a manner of speaking that clearly presupposes
that we have su‰ciently clear identity conditions for events). The natural
boundedness criterion, which is often invoked in making the distinction
between activities and accomplishments/achievements clear, is also hard
to apply to an ontological distinction. In contrasting the predicates ‘write
a letter’ and ‘play soccer,’ we easily see that the first includes a bound
which is not present in the second. This is not at all clear when we con-

414 D. Haug
sider the corresponding events. It is hard to see that the finished letter is
a natural (as opposed to arbitrary) endpoint to my writing, since I can
finish it whenever I like by adding a polite formula and sign. And if the
ontological distinction between arbitrary end and natural endpoint can-
not be made good, the distinction between activities and accomplishments
also cannot be upheld in the ontology, since there is, quite trivially, an
end to every event.9
This also poses problems for the notion of culmination as a two-place
predicate of events and times (as in, e.g., Parsons 1990); if I have eaten an
apple, then an event has culminated, namely the event of my eating an
apple. But, along the way, a lot of other events have culminated, for ex-
ample, the event of my eating half an apple. Eating an apple seems to
have no more (and no less) a natural endpoint than eating half an apple
or eating two apples. From this, we must conclude that culmination is
a three-place predicate of events, telic VPs, and times — or we may dis-
pose of culmination altogether and adopt the notion of event realization,
which amounts to the same for events that fall under telic predicates but
is also defined for events that fall under atelic predicates, which are
realized on any subinterval down to intervals su‰ciently large for the
subinterval property to hold. This notion of event realization is reminis-
cent of Parsons’ analysis of activities as being composed of homogenous
events that do culminate, but with the important di¤erence that event re-
alization is a three-place predicate of events, predications, and times.
But whereas events cannot be further subdivided in the ontology, there
is obviously an ontological distinction between events and states, whether
the latter are taken as individuals or as properties of times. And, although
Aristotle’s test does not strictly speaking bring out this distinction, it is still
possible that he had the distinction between states and events in mind. It
is notable that all stative verbs pass his energeia-test; he may have con-
ceived of the kinesis-test as an ancillary test that would not necessarily
apply to all kineseis. As Graham (1980) argues, all of Aristotle’s examples
of energeiai should be interpreted as stative verbs. It is no less clear that
all the examples of kineseis are verbs which — at least in their perfective
aspect — are telic predicates. The fact that Aristotle does not at all men-
tion such verbs as dakruō ‘cry,’ kamnō ‘work,’ or other dynamic predi-
cates which would pass his energeia-test might suggest a genuine hesita-
tion as to where they should belong in his ontology. On the other hand,
he must have been sure that ‘living’ should be included among the en-
ergeiai, since he probably made up the form ezēke in order to make zō ‘to
live’ pass his energeia-test.
There is another point which suggests that Aristotle is really after the
event/state distinction. In the section of the Nicomachean Ethics (1173–

1174) on pleasure,10 Aristotle tells us that pleasure is not a kinesis since it

cannot be said to be quick or slow. Interestingly, he exploits the ingressive
aorist in exposing this di¤erence: ‘‘we can get pleased (hēsthēnai, aorist
infinitive) quickly like we get angry, but we cannot be pleased (hēdesthai,
present infinitive) quickly.’’ (1173a, lines 34–35) If this incompatibility
with such adverbs is thought of as a criterion for energeia, it suggests
states rather than activities: kamnō ‘to work’ could probably combine
with such adverbs. Thus, if we are correct in thinking that Aristotle’s ki-
nesis/energeia-distinction corresponds to the modern distinction between
state and event — even though this is not clearly brought out by his
grammatical test — we must conclude that Aristotle discovered a distinc-
tion which is still among the most important ones in modern semantics.
Received 2 July 2002 University of Oslo

Revised version received
6 January 2003
Notes
1. This paper originated as one of my trial lectures for the doctor artium degree at the
University of Oslo, and was finished during my stay at the Sprachwissenschaftliches
Seminar, Universität Freiburg, as a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt
foundation, to whom I would like to express my gratitude. I would also like to thank
Atle Grønn, Eirik Welo, and Halvard Fossheim (all Oslo) for comments on earlier
versions of this paper, Christina Leluda-Voß (Freiburg) for interesting discussions, and
Prof. James Cathey (Amherst) for help with some of the English examples. Corre-
spondence address: Klassisk og romansk institutt, Postboks 1007 Blindern, 0315 Oslo,
Norway. E-mail: [email protected].
2. The German term ‘‘aktionsarten’’ is kept here (though without capitalization), since no
universally accepted English equivalent exists. The term seems to have been coined by
Karl Brugmann (1885) in his Greek grammar and thus belongs to a period when much
German linguistic terminology was borrowed into English; ablaut and umlaut are still
main entries in Trask (2000), although the calques apophony and metaphony have been
created.
3. In the transcriptions, I ignore accents, since they are not imporant here. The digrams
kh, th, ph stand for unvoiced, aspirated stops that are noted by single letters of the
Greek alphabet. Accord to tradition, vowel length is marked with makron, and not, as
in the IPA system, with ‘:’. I transcribe vowel length only when it is indicated in the
Greek alphabet, that is, only by e and o, and when a subscribed iota follows.
4. As has been pointed out in the literature on Kenny’s test (e.g. Parsons 1990: 37¤.), the
test is only valid if we understand that both verbs refer to the same event, in this case a
curing-event.
5. It is important to realize that hote does not mean ‘since’ but is a relative adverb of
time.

416 D. Haug
6. However, as the editor points out, a mass noun interpretation can still be forced
in perfective sentences by means of the partitive genitive. Thus, Ivan vypilPFV:PAST
pivaGEN: would mean ‘Ivan drank (some) beer (at one occasion).’ It is arguable whether
this sentence should be considered telic.
7. Note that the Greek aorist can have two readings with states: ebasileuse (the aorist
from basileuō ‘to be king’) can have the meanings ‘became king’ (ingressive) and ‘was
king’ (traditionally called ‘complexive use’). In Homer, perfects from such verbs are
always based on the ingressive reading, whereas in classical times they are often based
on the complexive use.
8. Perfects of motion verbs with allatival prepositional phrases are instructive in this re-
gard: consider Iliad 6.495 oikonde bebēkei (homewards walk3:SG:PLUPFCT: ) which means
‘she was walking homewards.’ It seems that the allatival oikonde (as opposed to an
illatival eis oikon ‘to the house’) excludes an endterminative reading. Instead, we get
an ingressive reading ‘BECOME be walking homewards.’ It is interesting that some
translators (e.g. the Norwegian Eirik Vandvik) have seen a reference to the beginning
of the event in this passage.
9. This is a most intricate problem for semantics, as can be seen from the treatment in
Krifka (1998: 207), where initial and final parts of an event e are defined so that e 0 is an
initial part of e if it is not preceded by any part of e, and similarly for final parts. This
clearly (and in my opinion correctly) does not distinguish natural and arbitrary limits.
Telicity is then defined as the property of an event predicate X that applies to events e
such that all parts of e that fall under X are initial and final parts of e. This is the
mereological heterogeneity criterion for telicity: telic predicates are heterogenous on
every interval that does not contain the initial and final part of the event. However, this
criterion is too strict, as can be seen from the following example: I build a house,
thereby completing an event e 0 of building a house. However, my wife, refuses to move
in before I have built a balcony and I immediately go on to fulfill her wishes, thereby
completing an event e of building a house. In any natural interpretation, e 0 is a sub-
event of e, and they both fall under the predicate ‘build a house,’ but e 0 is not a final
part of e. Thus, ‘build a house’ does not fulfill the telicity criterion of Krika, which
it should. This might lead us to reject the heterogeneity criterion for telic predicates,
and instead adopt a homogeneity criterion for atelic predicates, but, as is well known
(Dowty 1979: 163¤.), atelic predicates are also not homogenous at smaller intervals.
Thus, since not all atelic predicates are totally homogenous and not all telic predi-
cates totally heterogenous, we are (from the mereological view) forced to conclude that
(a)telicity is not a binary feature, but rather a scale. That this can be relevant for lin-
guistics is shown by the following examples from Smollett (2002). On a scalar inter-
pretation of telicity, it is clear that ‘build a lego tower’ is less telic than ‘build a house’
since a lego tower has no set end point, it can be added to indefinitely and the result is
still a lego tower, at least from the point where it has reached the height necessary to
qualify as a lego tower. And indeed, Smollett claims that ‘Thomas built a lego tower
for three hours’ is fine for her. She also claims that ‘Kathleen ate an apple for a couple
of minutes while talking on the phone’ is fine. We might just speculate that an apple
has a less clear end point than other things, since most people do not eat the kernel. In
the same way, ‘bake the cake’ (as discussed by Zucchi 1998) has an unclear end point,
which accounts for the acceptability of ‘John baked the cake for an hour.’ Clearly, a
telicity hierarchy should be defined and the theory further developed for such cases; see
Zucchi (1998) for an attempt involving precision states.
10. Note that in the following, I translate hēdesthai as ‘be pleased’ and not as earlier as
‘enjoy,’ in order to make clear the state connotations that I think are there.

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Aristotle’s kinesis/energeia-test and

the semantics of the Greek perfect1

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I aim to arrive at a better

Linguists presenting the modern taxonomy of aktionsarten2 often refer to

Linguistics 42–2 (2004), 387–418 0024–3949/04/0042–0387

2. Aristotle’s and Kenny’s tests

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Aristotle here seems to propose a linguistic test that distinguishes between

(1) oud’ hugiazetai kai hugiastai

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ascribe such a fallacy to Aristotle. Rather, something went wrong in the

Graham’s use of both Aristotelian and Kennyan terms is confusing, but

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Reichenbachian reference time of the pluperfect is naturally understood

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Vendler and Kenny did what we would expect in an Aristotelian tradi-

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3. The early Greek perfect — general considerations

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(4) Aristotelēs Athēnas ōikēke

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This sentence is simply false if uttered at a time when Aristotle no longer

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perfects (which primarily refer to a past event) like in the ungrammatical

4. The English and the Homeric Greek perfect

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e’s R-state holds at t 1 e culminates at some time at or before t

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Parsons’s analysis is clearly simpliﬁed and it leaves important questions

(7) ēōs de moi estin hēde duōdekatē hot’ es

The relative sentence es Ilion eilēloutha can plausibly be analyzed in the

be (elthein (e)5Agent (e, 1.sg.)5To (e, Ilion)5Hold (T(e), now))

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5. Target state in Greek

5.1. ‘‘Default aktionsart’’

It is well known that in languages with no overt aspectual morphology,

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5.2. Target state from telic VPs

With telic VPs, adopting Dowty’s (1979) decompositional analysis, it is

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5.3. Target state from stative VPs

This analysis can furthermore be directly extended to states, if we admit

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is utterly implausible that the perfect should have an intensive force. In

5.4. Target state from activity VPs

(13) Hērē, tipte bebēkas;

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6. The post-homeric development

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After the study of the examples which seemingly must be analyzed in

6.1. The perfect with atelic VPs

(14) ta men tetoke, ta de tiktei, ta de

Although, linguistically speaking, being in the puerperal state is not a

(15) phēs ē katarnēi mē dedrakenai tade?

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6.2. The perfect with telic VPs

Telicity in this connection must be somewhat delimited, since the Greek