On the History οf Compositional Aspect: Vicissitudes, Issues, Prospects

Abstract

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.

Compositional and Verbal Aspect in Greek: The Aorist Imperfect Distinction and the Article-Aspect Interplay

“…This study takes as an approach to the language data that it aims to analyze, mainly from Modern Greek, the theory of CA, as represented in certain publications -some recent (Bulatović 2013, Kabakčiev 2019, others long-established (Vendler 1957, Verkuyl 1972, 1993, Kabakčiev 1984. CA has been known in linguistics as a fundamental and supposedly universal phenomenon for half a century since Verkuyl (1972), but in spite of its widely recognized significance it has also generated serious theoretical controversies (Kabakčiev 2019).…”

“…This study takes as an approach to the language data that it aims to analyze, mainly from Modern Greek, the theory of CA, as represented in certain publications -some recent (Bulatović 2013, Kabakčiev 2019, others long-established (Vendler 1957, Verkuyl 1972, 1993, Kabakčiev 1984. CA has been known in linguistics as a fundamental and supposedly universal phenomenon for half a century since Verkuyl (1972), but in spite of its widely recognized significance it has also generated serious theoretical controversies (Kabakčiev 2019). Among the goals of this paper is the description of certain features of Greek related to the interdependence between the definite article and aspect in general, on the one hand, and the aspecto-temporal aorist-imperfect distinction, on the other, the interdependence proposed a long time ago for Bulgarian but generally ignored in the literature.…”

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“…Languages without articles such as Russian and the majority of Slavic tongues show that the definite and the indefinite article are not at all necessary for signaling definiteness and indefiniteness, and the regular pattern of a definite and an indefinite article in English and other Germanic languages actually serves the explication of perfectivity, the explication of imperfectivity being performed by the zero article Kabakčiev 1984Kabakčiev , 2000Kabakčiev , 2019. Thus the major function of the articles (definite and indefinite , their raison d"être, is not the signaling of definiteness and indefiniteness but is the signaling of temporal boundedness of nominal referents Kabakčiev 2000Kabakčiev , 2019. This means that the signaling of definiteness and indefiniteness is a residual function of the articles, not the major one.…”

“…Why should languages develop definite and indefinite articles then? The answer: because they need to signal aspect, not because they need to mark definiteness and indefiniteness (Kabakčiev 1984(Kabakčiev , 2000(Kabakčiev , 2019. A similar grammatical category that exists not to encode what it appears to encodeand the misrepresentation here is absolutely obvious -is gender.…”

“…14 But despite this concealment, the markers of temporal boundedness in a dog and that car remainthese are the article a and the determiner that Kabakčiev 2000Kabakčiev , 2019.…”