Compositional aspect (CA) is a fundamental language phenomenon discovered in 1972 by the Dutch linguist Henk Verkuyl. It is the mechanism of explication at the level of the sentence of the values of perfectivity and imperfectivity, otherwise found in verbs as lexical entries in Slavic and some similar languages. Its discovery ultimately made a huge breakthrough in linguistics, but the recognition of its significance came after years and decades of misunderstanding and twists and turns in conceptualization. Even today, nearly half a century after the discovery of CA, the theory behind it remains rather misconceived, despite the sea of publications dealing with it. This paper offers an overviewthrough the eyes of the author, hence inevitably polemicalof some of the history of CA, with its vicissitudes, issues and, most significantly, prospects.
The sequence of tenses (SOT) phenomenon has so far remained a mystery both across languages and in English, where its observation often triggers sentences contradicting reality. This forces linguists to define it as bizarre or "useless". The analysis of English SOT is based on Bulgarian data that reveal that a huge number of sentences falling into certain schemata, similar to English prototypical examples of SOT observation, are entirely non-grammatical. There exists an intriguing parallelism between certain sentence types in Bulgarian and English: exactly diametrically opposing cases of non-grammaticality. The non-grammaticality of the Bulgarian sentences is explained through a phenomenon called "speaker ghosting". This is partly applied to English data. A reinterpretation of English SOT is proposed: not a "mysterious rule" but, simply, a grammatical mood, and the raison d'être of English backshift mood (SOT) is identified: a crucially important device to prevent the elimination of non-cancelable content.
According to an aspectological model proposed by Kabakčiev in 1984, later developed and sophisticated, languages differ according to whether they mark aspect (perfectivity and imperfectivity) on verbs, as in the Slavic languages – among others, or through nouns/NPs featuring (non-)boundedness which is transferred onto verbs, as in the Germanic languages – among others. In this model of compositional aspect (CA), Bulgarian is a borderline case with a perfective-imperfective and an aorist-imperfect distinction and a definite article only (no indefinite), and the model is used to analyze Greek, a language exhibiting identical features. NP referents play a major role for the compositional explication of aspect. The study finds that Greek is of the same borderline/hybrid type of language as Bulgarian, featuring verbal aspect (VA) predominantly, but also peripherally CA. The aorist/imperfect distinction exists both in Greek and Bulgarian to offset the structural impact of the definite article. Analyzed are some conditions for the explication of CA in Greek and they are found similar to those in Bulgarian. However, there are specificites and differences between the two languages that must be further studied and identified. Keywords: verbal aspect, compositional aspect, definite article, article-aspect interplay, aorist-imperfect contrast
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.