A Systemic Functional “Three-Dimensional” Approach to Aspect in Thucydides’ Histories iii

Abstract

This paper approaches Ancient Greek aspect from a modern systemic functional framework. Its primary claim is that three metafunctions or dimensions (ideational, textual, and interpersonal) are necessary but also sufficient to account for all of the individual main clause verbs in historical narrative. The basic semantic value of the present and aorist aspects in Ancient Greek is the ideational meaning of unboundedness vs. boundedness. This opposition has led to opposite values on two other levels of meaning: (a) a textual meaning of background vs. foreground, discourse cohesion, and anticipation; and (b) an interpersonal meaning of internal vs. external perspective. This paper aims to apply this three-dimensional approach to a semantic analysis of a number of excerpts from Thucydides’ Histories III, to find out what the default metafunction is in narrative, and to demonstrate the balanced interplay between all three levels of meaning.