Aspect in Slavic revisited
Jadranka Gvozdanovic
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Abstract
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This paper examines the concept of grammatical aspect in Slavic languages, contrasting it with lexical aspect and exploring its implications for discourse. It discusses various theoretical approaches to perfective and imperfective aspects, highlighting their semantic differences and typological variations across Slavic languages. The work aims to establish a method for evaluating the semantic properties of grammatical aspects and their relevance in different linguistic contexts.
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This paper deals with the bounded/unbounded (telic [atelic/distinction which is relevant to the study of aspect (more specifically, 'Aktionsart') but which has been defined in different ways and has been applied to different objects in the linguistic literature. In thispaper the author aims (1) to clear up some of the confusion by formulating an accurate definition; (2) to show that the distinction has been wrongly defined in terms of two values (' + bounded' and '-bounded'), as some sentences clearly require a neutral value ('0-bounded'); (3) to make clear that this triple distinction also provides a basis for distinguishing between relevant classes of durational adverbiais; and (4) to throw some light on thefactors that determine the +bounded,-bounded, or 0-bounded character of linguistic objects. In most recent articles on aspect and related semantic problems a distinction is made between verb phrases like 'drink beer' and 'drink three glasses of beer'. The former are said to be 'unbounded' (atelic, durative, imperfective, nonconclusive, activities), the latter have been referred to as 'bounded' (telic,, nondurative, perfective, conclusive, terminative, resultative, performances, accomplishments). The distinction (which appears to go back to Aristotle) has proved very useful for explaining the meaning and use of particular verb forms in many languages. Thus, Garey (1957) relies on it to explain the difference between the French 'imparfait' and the 'passé composé'; Bauer (1970) and Zydatiss (1976) use the distinction to account for the different meanings and uses of the English perfect; and many linguists have applied it in making c1ear the different uses and implications of simple and progressive tense forms in English. In spite of the fact that it has been widely made use of, the distinction has not been applied in a uniform way. In the linguistic literature we find it applied to various objects, such as verbs (e.
Initial Boundary and Telicity in the Semantics of Perfectivity
The main purpose of this paper is to explore inceptive/inchoative verbs in view of the dominating current theories of aspectuality. In section 1 I provide a sketchy and selective overview of standard approaches to aspectual distinctions. In section 2 I review the Slavic aspectual system to set the background for exploring the relationship between Slavic aspectual contrasts and telicity in section 3. Then in section 4 I proceed to investigate inceptive/inchoative verbs. I demonstrate that in Slavic languages there is a systematic alternation between inceptive/inchoative verbs and stative verbs expressed by perfective and imperfective forms respectively. I conclude that this alternation is similar in many respects to the well recognized alternation between perfective and imperfective action verbs (i.e., telic and atelic events) also expressed by the perfective and imperfective forms respectively. This leads into the direction of postulating a symmetric approach to aspectual distinctions where initial boundary phenomena are a mirror image of final boundary phenomena.
The construction of viewpoint aspect. The imperfective revisited
This paper argues for a constructionist approach for Aspect by exploring the idea that viewpoint aspect does not exert any altering force on the situation aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the point of view where conflicts between situation and viewpoint aspect have been argued to appear in previous literature, namely, the imperfective. The paper focuses on the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive reading, and as a de-eventizizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes that this is not necessary and provides a unified semantics for the imperfective preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The article defends that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to analyze aspectual forms with in principle contradictory content such as perfective and progressive, which sheds light onto other issues such as the understanding of non-culminating accomplishments. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a non-differentiating one in languages such as English, while the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same.
Aspect and actionality in Lithuanian on a typological background
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Distinguishing between the aspectual categories ‘(a)telic’, ‘(im)perfective’ and ‘(non)bounded’
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Aspect in Czech and Other Slavic Languages. How Shall We Understand and Define Verbal Action?
The paper continues and updates former analyses of the author, concentrated mainly on the situation in Czech, but also analysing various situations in other Slavic languages. The conclusion supports Bernard Comrie’s interpretation of the perfective (dokonavý) aspect as ‘marked’, perhaps better defined as a ‘verbal definite article’, whereas the stronger and stronger Czech iterative as also ‘marked’, but as a ‘verbal indefinite article’. A verbal prefix has two functions: grammatical (turns an imperfective into a perfective verb), and lexical (changes the meaning of the verb, in this case the change may be none or null).
Interactions among Aspectual Properties in the - A ISSTA Imperfective Construction
Second Language Research, 2011
Kim, Jong-Bok. (2011). Interactions among Aspectual Properties in the – A ISSTA Imperfective Construction. Language Research 47.2, 153-173. The imperfective construction -A ISSTA (also called existential construction) represents a con-sequent state, but its licensing conditions are rather complex. The three main properties that have been claimed to play key roles in licensing the construction are transitivity, unaccusativity, and telicity of the eventuality involved, but none has explained the full possible range of data in ques-tion. In this paper, we discuss the properties of this imperfective construction and argue that a more viable analysis is one that allows tight interactions among the lexical, grammatical, and phasal properties of the aspect concerned. In particular, we show that a telic, nondurative achieve-ment eventuality occurs in the construction when it reaches a culmination point and its property is attained at the consequent state.
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Slavic Resultatives and Their Extensions: Integration into the Aspect System and the Role of Telicity
Resultatives represent clusters of temporal features (a state resulting from a change of state) which require telic stems as lexical input. In Slavic, all resultative constructions are based on participles. Resultatives often turn into perfects and passives. Most essential in this development is the extension of admissible lexical input to the resultative construction, by which, con-comitantly, the requirement that the verb stem be telic is lost. Simultaneously, Slavic participles distinguish perfective (pfv.) and imperfective (ipfv.) aspect. As a grammatical category, aspect is not restricted (or defined) by telicity, although telicity was a factor motivating the rise of the pfv.:ipfv.-opposition, and the association between telic events and pfv. aspect is very close. Considering this, the question whether ipfv. participles have been, or are, used in constructions other than resultatives needs to be investigated. We should ask whether the presumably original (i.e. Common Slavic) resultative function has been preserved by ipfv. participles, or whether they have participated in a perfect or, alternatively, in a canonical passive or some similar construction operating on voice. This paper sheds light on these questions. It first provides a survey of resultatives and perfects in Slavic through space and time, asking for the relation between telicity and the development of the pfv.:ipfv. distinction. Ipfv. participles used in constructions that developed out of resultatives behave in one of two ways: Either ipfv. participles show the same resultative value as their pfv. counterparts, a behaviour which can be considered an archaism prior to the strengthening of the aspect opposition , or, on the contrary, the aspect of the participles rather reliably restricts the range of functions which are known for the respective Slavic variety in the active voice. In these cases, ipfv. participles in predicative use have been integrated into the sets of functions that generally govern the choice of aspect in the particular Slavic variety. This dominance of aspect applies even if telicity constrains the choice of the aspect of the participle or the applicability of the entire construction.
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2004
In this chapter, I will lay out the foundations of a theory of imperfective tenses (including at least the present tense and the so-called imperfect in Romance languages) according to which present tense predicates (and, more generally, imperfectively marked predicates) are uniformly mapped into subject-predicate logical formats. The analysis of imperfective aspect in terms of predication will be argued to provide a uniform account of the two main readings of imperfective predicates (the so-called progressive reading, by means of which a sentence is interpreted as a report on the passing scene, and the so-called habitual reading, by means of which a sentence is given generic import).
On the Gigantic Fallacy that there is no Slavic-like Aspect in the Romance Languages and Aspect Resides Only in the Past Domain
Athens Journal of Philology, 2025
This paper deals with a very old drastic misconception, reiterated innumerable times through the decades, including recently, that the Romance languages feature no Slavic-like aspect (which is grammatically realized in verbs as lexical entries) and that aspect in these languages can only consist in grammatical contrasts morphological or periphrastic, such as aorist-imperfect and progressivenonprogressive. Data from five languages are used in the analysis: English, also as a metalanguage, French and German, discussed in publications under critique, Bulgarian, Russian. In French and the other Romance languages, aspect, understood precisely as the Slavic perfective-imperfective distinction, is realized in compositional termswhich are also grammatical in the long run, and only partly through the French passé composé-imparfait contrast and the analogous ones in the other Romance languages. Specially emphasized is the massive misinterpretation by aspectologists, and often lack of knowledge, of compositional aspect, a phenomenon discovered more than five decades ago by Henk Verkuyl.
A note on epistemic and effective meanings of the Polish perfective and imperfective
Vilnius University Open Series, 2021
The paper offers an analysis of selected uses of the Polish perfective and imperfective in the non-past indicative and in the imperative construction. In uses under consideration, both the perfective and the imperfective refer to a single complete occurrence of a telic process and, hence, the semantic contrast between them is not a matter of distinctions such as boundedness/unboundedness, completion/non-completion, telicity/atelicity, punctuality/durativity, etc. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of selected corpus examples which is aimed at elucidating the nature of the relevant contrast. The claim advocated in the course of the discussion is that the perfective/imperfective contrast may play a role in the system of clausal grounding in Polish, as it may convey the idea of, respectively, epistemic and/or effective non-immediacy/immediacy of the profiled process relative to the ground.
Verbal aspect in Slavic languages between semantics and pragmatics
Meta-Informative Centering in Utterances - Between Semantics and Pragmatics, Companion Series in Linguistics N°143, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 306 p., 2013
The main function of the linguistic category of aspect is perfectly reflected by the traditional term “aspect” or “view” which means that the speaker chooses a view of the situation s/he is speaking about. This view of a situation, or “point of view”, is first of all reflected by an internal analysis of the situation into parts: moments and stages. This necessary choice can be compared to that of a centre of attention in order to build an utterance (cf. the definition of subject and object in Chapter 4 in this volume). As such, aspect is an essential tool of the meta-informative structure of the utterance. The internal view of the situation is further completed by external view parameters concerning its repetition, the modification of its flow or intensity, the composition of several situations into one complex situation. This approach aims at integrating into a cohesive whole the great variety of uses described in the huge literature on verbal aspect in Slavic languages. The ASMIC theory is of great help in dealing with the blurred borderline between semantics and pragmatics in aspect usage, making it possible to propose some tentative way out of endless debates on Slavic aspectology: the problem of aspect pairs, the difference between aspect and Aktionsart, the amazing differences in the use of imperfective (IPF) verbs in Slavic languages and the use of the imperfect tense in French or progressive forms in English, etc. By reference to the three sorts of parameters we have defined (concerning situation types, situation internal and external view) we can distinguish precisely the different possible semantic types of perfective (PF) partners that can be derived from a simple IPF verb in Slavic languages depending on the type of semantic situation to which the simple verb refers (in a given context). The reference to the different values of the aspect parameters also makes it possible to distinguish among derived PF verbs those which can be considered as pertaining to grammatical aspect, as opposed to the lexical classes of derived verbs formed with prefixes having not only an aspectual perfectivising meaning but adding also various (spatial or abstract) meanings to the root verb.
Aspect and boundedness in English and Romanian
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2009
This paper deals with the interaction of verbal aspect and the type of verb situation (Aktionsart) by analyzing the influence of semantic characteristics such as stativity, duration and telicity on aspect in English and Romanian. The paper argues that aspect is related to boundedness in the sense that perfective aspect "binds" the situation which has a goal, while imperfective aspect does not. Thus the semantic notion of boundedness provides a more detailed and deeper analysis of situations with the distinctive feature [+ goal] by pointing out whether the goal was actually reached or not.
The acquisiton of aspect in Italian
Anuario Del Seminario De Filologia Vasca Julio De Urquijo, 2014
Aspect and bounded quantity complements in Russian
This paper investigates the actional recategorization of agentive accomplishment-and achievement-predications when interpreted in a temporally distributive manner. Temporal distributivity is present in a verbal predication if it refers to several entities involved in the given situation not simultaneously but sequentially, i.e., one after the other. In this case we have an incremental relation and the complement, interpreted distributively, is a derived and thus a secondary increment. Therefore, the terminative or aterminative actionality of temporally distributive predications is dependent on whether the secondary increment involves a bounded or unbounded quantity. This paper attempts to show that predications with a secondary increment bounded in its extent are hybrid with regard to their actionality, i.e., they can be both terminative and aterminative and thus in Russian permit perfectivization not only by the paired perf. verb but also by the delimitative procedural. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 explains the connection between terminativity and the category of aspect in Russian on the basis of elementary predications. Section 2 shows how elementary terminative predications (accomplishments and achievements) can be recategorized in respect of actionality by temporal distributivity. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to the conditions under which predications, recategorized in their actionality with an increment bounded in its extent, permit the use of the ipf. aspect in the so-called processual reading. In particular, section 3 treats the focalized-processual reading of the ipf. aspect, section 4 the durative-processual reading. Section 5 analyzes why and under which conditions predications with a secondary bounded increment can be interpreted as aterminative and thus be perfectivized with a delimitative procedural verb, delimiting the given situation temporally. The last section concludes with a summary. I use the following abbreviations: IMPF.= imperfective verb, PF.= paired perfective verb, PF-DELIM = perfective delimitative procedural verb which results from perfectivizing an imperfective verb which is aterminative by means of the prefix PO-delimiting the situation denoted temporally.
The Aspectual Meaning of Non-Aspectual Constructions
Languages
The distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has been identified in many languages across the world. This paper shows that even languages that do not have a dedicated perfective—imperfective distinction may endow a verbal construction that is not specifically aspectual with a perfective value. The crucial diagnostic for identifying perfectivity in a given non-aspectual construction is a difference in the temporal interpretation of clauses involving that construction, licensed by the actionality class of the main predicate: while stative verbs have a present interpretation, dynamic verbs yield a non-present (past or future) interpretation. This pattern of interaction is triggered by a phenomenon that has been referred to as the ‘present perfective paradox’, i.e., the impossibility of aligning dynamic situations with the time of speaking while at the same time conceptualizing them in their entirety. The latter type of construal is argued to be the main function of perfec...
Some Remarks on Grammatical Aspect in Latin
Philologia Classica, 2016
The existence of grammatical aspect in Latin is a much discussed issue. The main aim of this article is to review different approaches to this question and to discuss important arguments that have to be taken into consideration. Besides the traditional view according to which there is an aspectual difference between the infectum and perfectum stems, two other arguments claiming the existence of aspect in Latin have been proposed: aspect as a category inherited from Indo-European and aspectual difference between the Latin perfect and imperfect tense. On the one hand, I will argue that the difference between the perfect and the imperfect is of a temporal nature and that the Latin perfect is used both for telic (terminative) states of affairs and atelic (non-terminative) ones. Furthermore, the Latin perfect combines with expressions of duration which, except for special cases, are excluded with Russian perfective verbs.
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