The Aspectual Meaning of Non-Aspectual Constructions

Abstract

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 perfective aspect. The range of non-aspectual constructions with underlying perfective semantics includes ‘iamitive’ markers, an evidential, an epistemic supposition marker, a focus marker, a polar question marker, and a declarative marker. These constructions come from typologically different and genetically unrelated languages, illustrating the cross-linguistic salience of the category of perfective aspect.

The Discovery of Aspect: A Heuristic Parallel Corpus Study of Ingressive, Continuative and Resumptive Viewpoint Aspect

“…Smith (1997) argues that it is neither, and introduces an additional category at the level of (im)perfectivity-'neutral viewpoint aspect'-to account for their relationship. A third way out is to extend one's definition of (im)perfectivity to include not just totality but also transition sensitivity (Koss et al 2022), which results in 2 × 2 = 4 categories (in which case ingressivity would be non-total but transition-sensitive). For a heuristic study like the present one, however, the question whether -qilai's ingressivity abstracts to perfectivity or imperfectivity is not relevant.…”

“…222-25;Croft 2012, pp. 49-52;Koss et al 2022;, which assume aspectual bidimensionality (i.e., situation and viewpoint) and claim that viewpoint markers (e.g., ingressive and continuative) map phasal structure already (partly) present in the aspectual structure of situations. They thus have selectional preferences.…”

Nobody’s Perfect

“…W in this paper are aspects and some are tenses but deciding this fo 2 See Olsson (2013) for the original study of iamitives, a category w such as 'already'. See also Koss et al (2022) 'this issue'.…”

Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

“…If a synthetic form that combines perfective aspect and present tense is grammatically possible at all, it gives rise to the so-called 'present perfective paradox' (Malchukov 2009(Malchukov , 2011De Wit 2016;Koss et al 2022), triggering a shift in interpretation, resulting, for example, in a generic (narrative or habitual) meaning in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, or a futurate meaning in Russian (Comrie 1976;Malchukov 2009). Malchukov, following Breu (1994), argues that, in Bulgarian, present tense has won the competition between tense and aspect, leading to a generic present tense reading.…”