Completeness of action in the Russian and German languages: comparative analysis

Abstract

The aim of this research will be to conduct a comparative study of the category of aspectuality; that implies defining and analysing the whole complex of general and distinctive properties, characteristic of the languages under consideration, that is, Russian and German, revised in the comparative aspect. The research methods include descriptive method, distributive and introspective analyses. The authors indicate that today contrastive studies are especially relevant to identify common and distinctive features in systems of different languages. It is noted that actional and aspectual semantics, as well as the means of its expression, have become objects of study by linguists at the beginning of the 20th century. Attention is drawn to the actual domestic and foreign significant research in the field of aspectology of genetically unrelated languages, as well as languages that are in a distant genetic relationship. The form and tense of a verb are characteristics of temporality, since, for example, in the Slavic languages, the form organizes and determines temporal relationships. In contrast to the Slavic languages, in the Romance and Germanic languages, species relations are structured on the basis of temporal forms. The comparative approach to the study of time and species in languages belonging to different groups makes it possible to better understand the specifics of species-temporal relations. It is pointed out that the grammatical category of the species as a binary category is represented only in some languages. The need to distinguish between species as a grammatical category inherent in the Slavic languages and as a broad functional and semantic category that exists in all languages is emphasized, since it represents the entire complex of linguistic means that express the nature of the course of action. In the process of analyzing some texts, it was concluded that the absence of a grammatical category of the species in the German language does not indicate the absence of a corresponding concept. During the research, the authors came to the conclusion, that when studying the verb tense, it is necessary to take into account several other factors, apart from the verb forms: the context, the lexical, lexical-grammatical, grammatical and syntactic components, considered within the framework of their interaction in speech, since the functional-semantic field includes interacting means, united by the common function of expressing the semantic attribute of aspectuality, namely, grammar, lexical-grammatical and lexical means.