Many of the papers in Verbal Aspect in Discourse (1990, ed. Nils B. Thelin) look worth investigating:
In the light of growing insights into the universal temporal-semantic nature of aspectual distinctions, today’s aspectology has broadened its attention from restrictedly event-defining functions of aspect on the sentence level towards its primary perspectival functions on the discourse/situation level. Hereby it attempts to relate these functions to each other in ways that stimulate consistently language processing on a more solid perceptual-conceptual and pragmatic basis. Reflecting in various ways this general tendency. The 13 papers collected in this volume are oriented to four fields of research: (1) Developmental properties of aspect and tense; (2) Ideo-pragmatic and conceptual-semantic correlates of aspect and the perspectival organisation of discourse; (3) Aspect, case and discourse; (4) and Aspect in literary discourse. The editor’s Introduction gives a comprehensive survey of contemporary aspectology and its development towards a proper integration of discourse/situation conditions. Besides cross-linguistic considerations (including English), the languages analyzed specifically are Russian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, French and Finnish.
But I was immediately attracted to “Notes on the ‘Metaphysics’ of Russian Aspect” because it’s by Boris Gasparov, whose book on Ferdinand de Saussure I raved about here; I thought his analysis was interesting enough to quote in extenso, and I hope those of my readers who know Russian (or just have thoughts about aspect) will weigh in. Gasparov begins:
1. The past two decades have been marked by significant progress in the study of the meaning of the aspectual forms of the Russian verb. Throughout several decades, linguists were aiming at finding a common basis by which to unite the infinite variety of concrete meanings taken by the forms of perfective and imperfective aspect (Perf. and Imp.) in various specific cases. Striving for the attainment of this end, linguists have appealed to the ever broader and more abstract semantic categories in order to formulate in a more generalized and more coherent way a strategy which speakers of Russian follow in their use of aspectual forms. Each time, however, that research reached a more generalized level, it appeared that even at this level there existed a variety of relevant factors which had not been previously noticed. Consequently, the picture of the use of aspect at this new level split again into a series of particular cases which, in their turn, suggested the necessity of a new, still more generalized and abstract approach.
He summarizes the history of such attempts (structural studies, functional studies, and the narrative approach), then moves on to his own:
2. The goal of this article is to introduce an even broader perspective for describing the meaning of aspect. My hypothesis, which will serve as a starting point for subsequent discussion, is that the invariable distinction between the two aspectual forms lies not in any particular speech situation (be it a single situation described by an utterance, or the content of a whole narrative), but rather in two different world outlooks constituting two opposite modi of presentation of reality in language. The opposition of Perf. and Imp. is one of the most powerful tools (although by no means the only one) by which these two modi are expressed in the Russian language. In the framework of a proposed hypothesis, the meaning of Perfective and Imperfective aspect is related to two different models of the world (two “Weltanschauungen“) in whose formation the category of aspect, together with many other components of linguistic structure, takes its part. This abstract, “metaphysical” distinction between the meaning of Perf. and Imp. turns into a variety of concrete meanings, as the use of the aspectual forms is being adapted to different types of discourse, different functions in the narrative, and to the specific features of various situations described by single utterances.
As is well known, the meaning of Perf. is connected with a concept of the ‘integrity’ (or ‘compactness,’ or ‘closeness’) of the described situation. This general interpretation of the invariable meaning of Perf. is expressedin such concurrent linguistic concepts as that of the ‘limitation’ of the process (predel’nost’; Maslov 1948), or of potential limitation: the ‘telicity’ (Vendler 1967). In the framework of a proposed “metaphysical” approach this feature could be interpreted as the imposition of a particular world outlook according to which the process of life is viewed as a chain of successive events; the choice of Perf. for a certain utterance presents the situation described in it as a discrete “link” in this chain. The ensuing effect is as if the situation were enclosed into a “frame” which singled it out as a discrete event. The speaker views the situation as something “completed,” or at least having a potential limitation (‘telicity’), no matter what the actual matter-of-fact content of the situation might be. The relevant factor in viewing the situation from the perspective suggested by the Perf. form is not the limited nature of the described process, but rather, the very fact that the given situation has been perceived as a discrete event and thus singled out from the continuous flow of time.
With the use of Perf., the speaker assumes an external (objective) perspective in his view of the situation. He separates himself from immediate participation in the situation (hence the impossibility of Present tense with Perf.) and views it from the outside, as a “narrator.” Because of this, the speaker is able to comprehend the situation as an integral phenomenon.
Thus, the use of Perf. projects a world view according to which a person assumes the position of an external observer who is not immediately involved in the processes he describes in his message, although his actual experience is inextricable from the continuous stream of time in which all these processes are developing. By approaching the reality from this position, the speaker achieves a segmentation of his continuous experience; he singles out from his experience certain entities which become the integral objects of his observation and his description — in other words, become “events” in the framework of his message.
On the other hand, by choosing Imp., the speaker places himself, as it were, inside the very course of the described process. The external boundaries of the process are lost from this perspective. Such an outlook misses the “frame” of the situation; it is unable to single out the situation from the continuity of time flow. Consequently, the situation would not be perceived as a discrete event. Attention is concentrated on the very course of the process, on its flow and development, rather than on the essence of “what happened.”
In this case, the speaker assumes an internal (subjective) perspective in his view of the situation. Such a position projects an “existential” view of the world; it views life as a continuous experience into which every person (including the speaker) is inextricably immersed. Whatever portion of this continuous process (from the present, past, or future) comes into the speaker’s attention, his position in regard to it would be that of a co-experiencer, rather than that of an external observer and “narrator.” No matter what part (if any) the speaker actually took in the described action, he identifies his perception of it with the very process of its continuous unfolding. Because of this, the situation is perceived (and presented) not as an “event,” but rather as a part of a continuous “experience.”
He describes his theory in considerable detail and applies it, rather convincingly in my view, to three Bunin miniatures from 1930: Идол (The idol), with only one perfective verb, запомнились ‘they remembered,’ which “sets the perspective of the entire story for the reader”; Канун (The eve), with no perfectives (“This text achieves the status of narrative due to the implied reference to the impending disaster of the revolution which is to occur very shortly thereafter”); and Небо над стеной ‘The sky above the wall,’ which also has no perfectives:
The reader, in his effort to make sense of the story, has to come to a realization of the fact that the only narrative focus of the story consists in the very absence of any explicit eventual focus. In this case, the story can be interpreted as a narrative about the “flow of life,” about being as an existential, non-discrete process. The meaning of the story is focused on an understanding that life as a continuous experience is “greater,” and more significant, than any occurrences in the realm of “events,” and that therefore the author/narrator refuses to place the descriptive part of his experience in the framework of a conventional “story.”
Here’s his conclusion:
6. To sum up, it is necessary to emphasize once again that the principal, most basic difference in the meanings of Perf. and Imp. consists neither in the character of the situations represented with their help, nor in the content of the narrative story as such, but rather in two fundamentally different world views projected onto the content of what is said, be it a single statement or a story. The category of aspect offers to the speaker a formal instrument with the help of which the speaker is able to place two fundamentally different and mutually complementary points of view onto human experience. These two Weltanschauungen present the world as consisting either of events or of existential experiences.
The use of Perf. suggests the interpretation of the entire process of existence as consisting of discrete events. Each of these events appears as a single, compact whole, looked at in its entirety, as if from an external (objective) point of view. The perception of the flow of time, in which each of these events occurs, either remains implicit, or is segmented into individual quantums, each of which coincides with the borders of each individual event; in the latter case, the flow of time is simply equated with the sequence of events. By contrast, the choice of Imp. encourages the interpretation of being as a non-discrete temporal flow — a state of continuous evolvement experienced by the subject. The action as such is dissolved in the temporal flow, the borders of the action as an individual event erode. The message in this case is focused not on action in a strict sense, but rather on conditions experienced by the subject in the process of producing these actions. Such a perspective offers a picture of the world presented in a passive modus. The world is viewed as a total experience, in which, in essence, nothing “new” can happen, no “event,” in the strict sense of the word, can occur; within this modus of presentation, everything which happens proves to be only a development of the total process of existence, continuous and limitless in its flow.
The “metaphysical” nature of verbal aspect in Russian may be compared with the way in which the category of definiteness functions in languages which have articles. The choice of the definite or the indefinite article allows the speaker to present all objects in two fundamentally different “metaphysical” dimensions. Generally speaking, the determinate form gives an actual description of the object, viewing it as a component of a situation, while the indeterminate form gives a classificational description of the object, viewing it as a representative of a certain conceptual class. Thus, the whole domain of objects can be alternatively treated within an “operational” or “conceptual” mode of presentation.
This fundamental alternative in the presentation of objects is lacking in Russian; however, a similar phenomenon arises in Russian in the domain of processes, due to the category of aspect. The necessity of employing one or another aspectual form compels the Russian speaker to continually make a choice between two alternative points of view on the processes, in a way not unlike that in which the necessity of using articles makes the speaker of one of the Germanic or Romance languages choose between two different points of view on objects.
In speaking of the similarity between articles and aspect, we should bear in mind that what is meant here is a general, “metaphysical” similarity of the principles according to which the world experience is presented and organized in language, rather than an actual resemblance between the meaning of the two categories. What is common among the two categories is the presen[c]e of alternative perspectives under which certain facts of life (objects in one case, processes in another) can be presented.
The form of Imp. serves as the most powerful and the most regular means by which the existential picture of the world, as an alternative to the modus of actions/events, is formed in the Russian language. However, there are many other highly effective means for the expression of the existential meaning in Russian: such as, for instance, impersonal constructions, or certain variants of word order (the reverse word order “Predicate — Subject”). On the whole, grammatical devices aimed at expressing existential meaning are extremely well represented in the Russian language.
Obviously this is no more the last word on the subject than the previous approaches, but it seems useful to me, and I’m curious how it strikes others.
“The necessity of employing one or another aspectual form compels the Russian speaker to continually make a choice between two alternative points of view on the processes, in a way not unlike that in which the necessity of using articles makes the speaker of one of the Germanic or Romance languages choose between two different points of view on objects.”
(1) Are they actually saying here that Russian’s aspectacularity “picks up the slack”, as it were, for the absence of (definite or indefinite) articles? In other words, that aspect in Russian “does the work” of definite articles in English?
(2) I would not know how to translate the following into any language: “in a way not unlike that in which”
(1) That’s not how I read it. Gasparov is saying that the required choice of aspects in Russian is somewhat analogous to the required choice of articles (or zero article) in English.
(2) “Not unlike” means “kind of like”. “That in which” may be pedantic but I don’t see the problem with it. “The way in which” might be better. Possibly he should have said the choice in English is like the choice in Russian, as I did above. I’d have thought the way Russian compels an choice of aspects is exactly the same as the way English compels a choice of articles (or determiners): grammar requires it. Or possibly I’m misreading him.
Of course, English also requires a choice of tense, aspect, and whatever else. On this subject, I’ve long wondered what the word is for that. Suppose I notice that someone learning English often says “will go” where “go” is correct, “since I try” where “since I’ve been trying” is correct, and so forth. The way I was brought up, I’d say they have trouble with verb tenses, but we’re told those differences aren’t differences of tense. So could someone please fill in the blank? “That person has trouble with ___ in English.”
Thanks, Prof. Friedman,
I didn’t think he was taking the claim that far, but, you never know — sometimes the ideas get a little ahead of you.
I’d say the term you’re looking for is “aspect”, isn’t it? And I’ve observed the same language phenomenon that you have; typically among Germans learning English. But I also experience it from the other side, invariably sbagliando, in Italian, whether to use “faccio” (I do) or “sto facendo”) (I’m doing) because “faccio” and “sto facendo” don’t map onto “do” and “am doing”; it’s a Venn diagram.
tl;dr Every language has slightly different ideas about what is defined by terms like “progressive”, “imperfect”, “perfect(ive)”, “aorist”, “preterit”. In Luganda (a Bantu language), there’s apparently a special “tense” you’re supposed to use depending on whether you’re referring to something that happened either inside or outside a 36-hour time window from the time of the locution. We are different, but same.
There is a huge literature on aspect, and on its interaction with tense. This very well-trodden ground, although (as with focus) it’s well-trodden largely because it throws up a great many analytical problems, to which there are no universally agreed answers.
“Metaphysical” is worrying.
Gasparov presumably knows what he is talking about as far as Russian goes (certainly vastly more than I could ever do); however, any attempt to derive aspect systems from some sort of universal human cognitive categories seems very misguided to me.
Many West African languages have a fundamental perfective/imperfective distinction in their verbal systems. This overlap enough with Russian to make it reasonable to use the same two terms to label the dichotomy, but that’s about it. The details of usage are very different, though there is a good but of agreement between various different West African languages, even from unrelated language families.
For example, in Kusaal, the perfective is both formally and semantically the unmarked aspect, and it often appears with present-tense meanings.
English. incidentally, also has a pervasive system of compulsorily marked aspect in verb phrases. This by no means a thing which arises from any unique Russian Weltanschauung.
In Luganda (a Bantu language), there’s apparently a special “tense” you’re supposed to use depending on whether you’re referring to something that happened either inside or outside a 36-hour time window from the time of the locution. We are different, but same
Thirty-six hours would be pretty weird, but many Bantu languages distinguish today-pasts, yesterday-pasts ans so forth.
Kusaal (distantly related to Bantu, but much better known to me) has distinct tense markers for
two days in the future
tomorrow
earlier today
yesterday
day before yesterdat at least
longer ago than that
In addition, it has a separate form for “earlier today, but now not happening any more.”
All of these tense markers can occur with either perfective or imperfective aspect: aspect and tense are complelely orthogonal in Kusaal. However, future markers require a special irrealis mood, and cannot occur with the indicative.
On top of all that, tense marking can be focused, which produces meanings marked by certain aspectual distinctions in English. (This is common Bantu as well: there a couple of classic papers on the phenomenon.)
any attempt to derive aspect systems from some sort of universal human cognitive categories seems very misguided to me.
To me as well, but I’m primarily interested in grasping the Russian system from as many angles as possible.
Fair enough. Especially as there is no adequate “universal” theory of aspect, so ruling out additional data of this sort would be pretty stupid. I agree. More angles!
Though an actual Russian, appealing to his own intuitions, might (counterintuitively) not be the best guide. Sprachgefühl can mislead, even in your own language. Perhaps especially in your own language, sometimes. (One of the very many things wrong with the Chomskyan linguistic-research-via-navel-gazing method, of course.)
Pity it’s not open access. It does look interesting, I agree. But not €152 interesting …
(2) auf eine Art, die der nicht unähnlich ist, in der – German solves problems by adding extra clauses.
Supposedly, all the best accentologists are Germans precisely because German uses aspect very sparingly (western)* or not at all (eastern).
* As I described in this comment after all the hypothesizing about the history of English grammar.
“Though an actual Russian, appealing to his own intuitions, might (counterintuitively) not be the best guide”
I think LH is also interested in where native speakers can be misled to:)
You know me so well!
There is such a genre as “fill in the blanks” exercises for Russian learners.
Sometimes students post them requesting help of native speakers. We can’t help because usually no matter what aspect you use the example remains entirely correct and usually conveys same information about the event.
“In speaking of the similarity between articles and aspect, we should bear in mind that what is meant here is a general, “metaphysical” similarity of the principles….” – I think I once posted here an example where the choice of aspect in Russian actually affects the choise of article in English. Can’t remember it:(
DE, you call it copious examples?
Sure, Bunin used imperfect in those short stories to great effect (maybe even deliberately using only imperfect aspect), though I am not sure how much metaphysical. For example, in The eve, he clearly disassociates himself from “aккуратного и уверенного в себе господина” (well dressed and self assured gentleman, maybe). Maybe under the metaphysical approach, the Storyteller is only trying to disassociate himself from the gentleman, but cannot? Anyway, it’s hard to figure out what exactly is metaphysics in some more common examples of the use of aspect. Say, “Шел в комнату, попал в другую” is changing the perspective on the event with each half-sentence?
you call it copious examples?
Copiosity can be provided (if anyone has the stamina for it …)
I’ve done a lot of thinking about tense and aspect in Kusaal …
I also have a copy of Derek Nurse’s excellent Tense and Aspect in Bantu, which is highly recommendable. Bantu includes some of the most complicated tense systems out there, though the languages mostly don’t go overboard with aspect.
Supposedly, all the best accentologists are Germans precisely because German uses aspect very sparingly (western)* or not at all (eastern)
Presumably “aspectologists”? Actually, my experience has been the opposite: even very sophisticated grammars by L1 German speakers often seem to me to struggle with aspect, to the degree that I have actually wondered if this is due to the near-complete absence of grammaticalised aspect in modern German. But I may well just have read an unrepresentative sample.
And in principle, the absence could indeed make German speakers better at looking at aspect cross-linguistically. A lot of writing on aspect has been undermined by too readily taking the Slavonic systems as normative (a natural enough error, given the history of the notion in linguistics.)
Incorrect aspect usage in English is, in many a Brill linguistic publication, one of the giveaways that (a) the author is German or Dutch and (b) the publisher sees no need for L1 English speakers as proofreaders.
You get things like “in his seminal work Language, Bloomfield has shown that …”, which no native speaker would write. Unless they hadn’t heard the news that Leonard Bloomfield is sadly no longer with us …
“conveys same information about the event. ” – even if the context were given (it isn’t, lines in such exercises are meant exaclty to serve as indirect pointers at some context…) both variants often are heard in same (roughly) physical context.
To take a crude example, while usually listing of what you did yesterday (I did A then I did B then I did C) is done in perfective (and Ehglish simple tense) you can use imperfective (and maybe English “was doing”?) as well, of course.
You’re just listing what you were doing, not what you did:)
Crude because usually in listing we use perfectives. But you are not always “listing” when you say “yesterday I did A”.
“Yesterday we went(imperfective) (in)to cinema” is instead telling how you and freinds spent the evening/entertained yourselves.
It can be changed to perfective пошли (lifted your arse from the couche and headed there) if the decision to go there is anyhow unusual (or also when the attempt was unsuccessful or…) or to сходили, making the listener think of the result rather than the process.
Back to listing/narration: it is there “I was doing A and then I was doing B” (if it works in English?) sounds like an invitation for the listener to put herself in the speakers shoes and follow her in the timeflow. Indeed “subjective”.
“Aspect” is actually one the happier technical linguistic terms, in that its non-technical sense quite rightly implies that the distinctions between aspects are not to do with the actual intrinsic nature of the event or state described, but with how it is viewed in the particular linguistic context. Exactly the same event or state may end up being presented in different aspects, and it is quite certainly the case that discourse phenomena can have everything to do with that. (The basic idea behind the collection of papers is certainly sound.)
Lots of African languages (naturally including Kusaal) have special tense/aspect constructions in clauses which continue a narrative thread (as opposed to setting the scene at the beginning, asides, descriptions or flashbacks.) It’s not rare outside Africa, come to that: the Algonquian language Meskwaki/Fox has this too, and I suspect that a lot more languages would turn out to do this if people looked for the phenomenon properly.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tense-aspect/#Dis
is about this. Though not particularly perspicuous; or perspicacious. But after all, that’s a philosophy site, not a linguistics site. They’re looking at the matter from a different aspect* …
Still, it shows that this is a well-worn topic.
* Sorry.
@Benjamin E. Orsatti,
Thanks for the answer, Counselor (though a prefer a less formal atmosphere). I’m not sure whether aspect is the term I want. What about “I finished to read it” instead of “I finished reading it”—is that an error of aspect?
Come to think of it, Russian sort of does have perfect aspect in the present (so much worse for the facts). For example, она смотрит (she looks [on]) can be made perfect as она посматривает (she glances occasionally). Now, theoretically, a text book will tell you that it is also imperfect, but compare it to она смотрела/посмотрела and она будет смотреть/посмотрит.
@drasvi
Why is posmatrivaet perfective for you? For the form, prefix po is not forcing perfective (poidu, podaju) and the (i)vat’ is used in other verbs which seem to be non-perfective by definition (in fact verbs like pogladyvat’ seem to indicate a pattern of back-formation from the perfective in po to indicate intermittent or ongoing action). Is the semantics “intermittent” always perfective for you?
Cross-linguistically, “imperfective” is often used for repeated individual events, any one of which would be expressed by a perfective. For example in Kusaal, with the imperfective kpiid of kpi “die”:
Nidib kpiid.
“People die.” (in general, i.e. “people are mortal”)
Nidib kpiid nɛ.
“People are dying.”
(could be continuous/progressive, said by e.g. a reporter actually on a battlefield, or, more likely, multiple events over a limited period, said e.g. during a famine.)
Some languages have a distinct aspect for this: aspect systems can be a good bit more complex than in Kusaal or Russian (including in some other Slavonic languages. And English, which has aspects which are not even mutually exclusive.)
This посматривает could be a Russian instance of this kind of thing, even though the repeated-event type is not a fully independent aspect of its own in Russian.
It does seem to combine a usually-perfectivising prefix with a typically imperfective suffix.
As far as Russian itself is concerned, the very fact that the form is present tense could be taken to show that it has to be analysed as imperfective. This, admittedly, seems kinda circular, but as I say, we’re not talking cosmically valid abstract theoretical conceptual categories here – just looking for straightforward ways to label the behaviour of one particular language. (And all grammars leak, anyway.)
“there a couple of classic papers …”
DE, do you remember the title of any of them, or other papers about the same? (just want to understand what you’re talking about…)
As for discource “having everything to do with” that, I’m not sure.
If we call “discourse” everything which is not about forms or semantics (narrowly: correspondence of messages to palpable referents) then there will be no point in using this exact word.
If we use it more narrowly… then I’m not sure, as I said.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45643403_Auxiliary_Focus
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tom-Gueldemann/publication/40851846_Present_progressive_vis-a-vis_predication_focus_in_Bantu_-_A_verbal_category_between_semantics_and_pragmatics
The papers are very relevant to the system in Kusaal, where the focus marker nɛ distinguishes e.g.
O nuud.
“He drinks.”
from
O nuud nɛ.
“He is drinking.”
Despite the English translations, I don’t think that this is actually an aspect distinction in Kusaal: the particle is focusing the (phonologically null) present-tense marker. The evidence for that is quite complicated though (in a nutshell, it’s based on analogous uses of nɛ in other cases, where a continuous/progressive interpretation is impossible; the evidence that nɛ is actually still a focus particle here is more straightforward, and based on co-occurrence restrictions.)
DE, aha, thanks!!! Reading:)
Could someone tell if narrations in the spirit of “for a half an hour I was doing my homework, then I was brushing my teeth, then having my dinner and walking with my dog…” are common/normal in English?
Or do -ings normally go with other verbs like “spent” here?
I’m specifically interested in was …ing and not any (other) mistakes I made here. (I remind that my English is terribly one-sided. I never communicated with native speakers informally and orally, I never studied it, I picked it from books).
In Russian such an account of say yesterday’s eveining has the logical structure of an answer to a hyphothetical (!) request to specify what you were doing in every given point in time (so as to ‘fill’ the whole interval called evening). Practically it happens if you want to explain why you’re tired, bored or whatever or indeed what exactly have you done to the x hours of your time with emphasis on time.
A more common “I did this then that” is more like either a list of achievements or iportant “events”.
I know, I’m repeating myself, but this is somehow important because if there is such a distinction in English as well, it explains what Gasparov means by subjectivity. It DOES feel as an invitation to follow the character from within her head (thus suitability for explaining how you’re bored) and embedded in time (as a stick drifting in a river). The “did” version does not feel so at all, thus G’s “external”.
@PP, that was D.O., not me:)
And I’not sure what he means.
Nevertheless:
po-‘s role in some verbs can be different*, but one common and productive meaning is not very perfective semantically. Namely, doing something for a while (sometimes with a shade of “unseriously”): я немного почитал и лёг спать. So it is not a point in time, and not an “event”, it is an interval with blurred limits and the character is said to have spent some time (perhaps but not always lazily) reading an article that DE just linked before going to bed.
“not a point, not an event” totally sounds like the definition of imperfective:)
It is even logical somehow that there is such a form, after all what if you (a) want to insert this “reading” into perfective narration of events (“did A then B then C”) but you only read a small random fragment of the artcile, not the whole of it, so a resultative form won’t work?
But such verbs are a bit weird (and maybe sound more subjective and informal). I mean: semantically anomalous.
As many prefixes both impart their own meaning to the verb (as вписать lit. inscribe: to insert a text into something) and make it perfective, there is a need for a way to use prefixes with imperfective verbs.
-yva- serves this exact purpose.
*e.g. with verbs of movement (pojdu, poplyvu) which have two common perfectives, po- for the starting point/initiation of the movement s- for successful complete resultative** trip (round trip).
** If you сходил в лес за дровами (“(in)to forest for firewood”), then most likely you also have brought some firewood back home (not necessarily, but failure to get it may motivate the speaker to use a different verb and filure to reach the forest itself will almost invariably make her want to change the verb. Using it will be somewhat misleading. But not an error: “have you сходил to the forest as planned?” “Yes, but I did not even reach the forest” is a possible answer.- the point 3 in the plan is completed… unsuccessfuly.).
Could someone tell if narrations in the spirit of “for a half an hour I was doing my homework, then I was brushing my teeth, then having my dinner and walking with my dog…” are common/normal in English?
Not normal, no. You could start off “for a half an hour I was doing my homework” to set the scene, but after that you’d switch to the simple past: “then I brushed my teeth, had my dinner and walked my dog…”
And it would be more common to use the simple past throughout: “For half an hour I did my homework, then I brushed my teeth, had my dinner…” You normally use the “was … -ing” form to give the background against which another action took place: “I was doing my homework when the doorbell rang.”
Could someone tell if narrations in the spirit of “for a half an hour I was doing my homework, then I was brushing my teeth, then having my dinner and walking with my dog…” are common/normal in English?
No. It’s perfectly grammatical, but it’s marked. It would be natural in context if the narrator was specifically emphasising the time elapsed during these activities for some reason, or if the context was that they were (say) waiting for a phone call from someone all the while. It isn’t something you’d write as a simple narrative of what you did that day.
It would actually also be natural if the narrator was in fact describing, not one particular day, but reminiscing about how some typical day used to go at a particular period in their life.
Discourse factors!
[Ninja’d by Hat!]
@LH, DE, thank you!
@DE, actually what you said is also ture for Russian: it is marked here too!
But it is still fairly normal (even if less common and marked etc.), particulary when emphasising the time elapsed – or just the flow of time as I told above. It does not sound “strange” but implies a specific tone. From LH’s answer and your decisive “no” I assume it is MORE marked and used more narrowly in English.
Your second parargraph (“not one particular day”) is interesting: I don’t think (continuous) imperfective works like this in Russian. It is just a more detailed account of how you spent your time with emphasis on spending time rather than achievments.
____
There is an adjacent meaning of Russian imperfective where it is used regularly and thus hardly “marked”.
Yesterday you met your friend M. and did something exciting, say went to [theater, some famous restaurant, climbed rocks…]. Now you are telling how you spent your evening with M.
You say “[discourse particle for exciting news] we yesterday to [famous restaurant’s name] went-Impfv!”. (а мы вчера …. ходили! )
The emphasis here is what you experienced and how you spent the evening… which is exactly the usual purpose of telling such things to freinds.
Perfective is less common. Still possible if
– you climbed the cliff and reached the top and reaching the cliff top is an interesting achivement (it s not the process that matters)
– you planned going to that restaurant for ages and discussed it with me, and now it (what we discussed) has been done (and this fact deserves to be stressed at the expense of emphasis on the experience itself).
– there is some result which accordingly deserves a resultative perfective.
etc.
Perhaps this adjacent meaning makes imperfective lists more natural than they would have been otherwise…
CGEL (naturally) is all over this question of the English progressive: Section 8 of Chapter 3.
(I see that they call the Perfect a “secondary tense” rather than an aspect. I’d forgotten that. “He was some kind of man… What does it matter what you say about people?”)
It’s perhaps worth pointing out that although the English progressive is imperfective aspectually, not all aspectual imperfectives are progressive, by any means. The “simple” forms can be perfective or imperfective. This causes trouble to English speakers trying to learn Romance (or Latin) past tenses, which do distinguish perfective/imperfective. There’s no straightforward matchup.
PlasticPaddy, that was me trying to overturn Russian grammar.
Obviously, according to the well-established tradition, Russian doesn’t have perfect aspect in present and therefore no prefix can create one in any verb. My observation is that in the past and future that is what is happening and we can sort of see it in the present as well. Not being even an amateur linguist, I am of the opinion that formal (syntactic, morphological) features have to be separated from semantic ones, that’s why no matter what any construction means it should not affect it’s classification. Having said that, what Russian really lacks is (at least systematic, maybe there are occasional counterexamples) a form to express distinction between continuous and habitual action. Because посматривать and its ilk really cannot have a continuous sense, it’s a series of discrete actions, it does sorta kinda takes on that perfective sense also.
P.S. DE grokked it
Or wait. I’m wrong.
Of course is the day is generic I can NOT use perfective!
Perfective refers to a specific unique event (which reminded me Gasparov’s “articles”).
I can only use a habitual/repeated form like ходил or progressive like шёл (distinguished for verbs of movement and only those).
P.S.
@PP I forgot to say:
-yva- with po- verbs (those strange po- verbs that mean doing for a while) also results in something semantically unusual: verbs that refer to intermittent (not merely “habitual” or “progressive”) action.
“Почитывал” something means either occasionaly reading such things (or one specific book) or if it is one reading session, then doing it intermittenly and perhaps in parallel with something else.
Just as you wrote. And sounds markedly more informal than just почитал (perhpas hinting on carelessness).
Incorrect aspect usage in English is, in many a Brill linguistic publication, one of the giveaways that (a) the author is German or Dutch and (b) the publisher sees no need for L1 English speakers as proofreaders.
You get things like “in his seminal work Language, Bloomfield has shown that …”, which no native speaker would write. Unless they hadn’t heard the news that Leonard Bloomfield is sadly no longer with us …
It didn’t sound so bad to me, and there are exceptions in the BNC. They were far between, so I stopped at two.
“In his classic book The Prophets, Abraham Heschel has shown that Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah and Isaiah all considered their own input to be a crucial part of their message.”
Karen Armstrong, The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (1991). Heschel died in 1972.
” At least one well-documented zodiac has now been claimed by its author to be a conscious fabrication, and the astrologer John Addey has shown how easy it is to ascribe the characteristics of the signs of the zodiac to places chosen at random, in his humorous example of the Cheam Zodiac.”
Philip Heselton, The Elements of Earth Mysteries (1991). Addey died in 1982.
Yes, I also thought “no native speaker would write” was overstated. I was sure if I searched I’d find examples (thanks for doing the spadework!); it’s clearly unusual and not according to specs, but it’s not WRONG-wrong. Further research is needed.
Welsh doesn’t have the English progressive/non-progressive contrast, either.
Dw i’n canu means both “I sing” and “I’m singing” for example.
(One of the numerous reasons why John McWhorter’s ideas about the development of the English tense system reflecting Brythonic influence don’t hold water at all.)
The English system used to give trouble to L1 Welsh speakers in the days when there still were any who weren’t also L1 English speakers.
@JF, Hat:
Yes, that’s what I get for making up a bad example (though it does have the implicature that Bloomfield is still alive for me. I wonder if it’s just me, or one of those subtle US/UK differences we stumble on from time to time?)
How about this, from Doris Richter’s grammar of Mbembe?
(I should immediately say that the book is excellent, clear and well-written: I’m in no way criticising the author.)
Again, I don’t find that impossible, just awkward. It can be made perfectly respectable with a comma (which I would have suggested had I been copyediting it): “Although Jukunoid languages have already been recorded, by Koelle in his Polyglotta Africana (1854)…”
Wait, though, that implies that Jukunoid languages had not been recorded between 1854 and the time of Richter’s grammar; if that’s not the case, then it’s wrongety-wrong.
It’s not the case, happily. It’s not a brilliantly documented group, but there’s been a good bit done. Richter’s own work is easily the best thing I’ve seen so far, though.
Koelle was a phenomenon. In some ways we still haven’t got much farther than he did when it comes to West African language classification.
Now I think of it, most of the works I consult regularly which are by L1 German speakers not writing in German are actually by L1 German speakers writing in French. My French is certainly not up to spotting cases where I could say “no L1 French speaker would have written that” …
Is Koelle just a fancy way of writing Kölle, or are o and e two separate vowels (as in Lueger)?
…Never mind, I looked it up and it is in fact Kölle.
Says WP: His [Brit] descendants pronounce the name as “Kelly”.
Because of course they do.
Has Anybody Here Seen Koelle?
The online appendices to the Nurse book* say that Luganda has two pasts, “more or less Hodiernal vs Beyond Hodiernal.”
I suspect that the “eighteen hours” thing reflects a premodern missionary linguist’s misunderstanding of the system. Bantu languages usually count sunrise as the beginning of the day for tense purposes (like Oti-Volta), but if Luganda is one that starts the day at sunset it might explain it. I can’t find any information on this, unfortunately.
* They were the devil to find. The URL given in the actual book leads to a 404 page, as does that given in the second edition of The Bantu Languages (published 2019.)
Has anybody here seen Koelle?
His feet must be awfully woet
Because he lost his woelles,
Which I haven’t found as yoet
Either.
two pasts, “more or less Hodiernal vs Beyond Hodiernal.”
Could there be a connection with German Hodenhernie ? The distinction would be between the acute past and the necrotic past.
Let’s look to the future rather than dwelling on the painful past.
@DE:
It’s not a UK-U.S. difference, since both Karen Armstrong and Philip Heselton are English.
There are differences between American and British uses of present perfect and past. I was going to say that American English uses the present perfect less than British English, but Google ngrams butted in with contrary evidence.
Just me then.
Actually, “current relevance” (the main nuance of the English perfect) could apply to lots of things other than the subject still hanging around.
The Kusaal earlier-today-but-not-any-more tense that I mentioned above is a sort of antiperfect, not-current-relevance form. Such things are actually quite common in Africa:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272264027_Towards_a_typology_of_discontinuous_past_marking
Plungian and van der Auwera call it “discontinous past”, which doesn’t seem much better as a name than “antiperfect”, but I can’t come up with any improvement on it.
The cognate marker in Nõotre seems to be used for the ordinary past tense in narrative, but the published materials are so scanty that it’s hard to be sure.
Huh – yes. No idea how I did that.
I didn’t know that, but I can see why. I was taught at school that the pres. perf. means there’s a result with current relevance, and that the simple past comes in when a point in time is mentioned (e.g. “1854” or even “in his seminal work Language“); it did take years to sink in that the latter quite consistently overrides the former – that just seems entirely contrary to how the rest of the system is set up.* It makes sense that there’s more current relevance, enough to override the point in time, if Bloomfield himself is still current and can repeat the demonstration!
* It’s not “a system”, and it’s not “set up”. Rules develop without regard to other rules; sometimes the native speakers then sort the rules out into something more or less like a system, sometimes only halfway.
Maybe something like a forest (or even a person) can serve a metaphor for grammar. Its elements are itnerconnected in many ways, but there is still enough place for random/arbitrary/unpredictable features:)
Except that most languages are more like a forest that has recently grown up in a deserted part of a city (or in some other transitional environment where it is subject unpredictable strong influences). Normal forests change slowly and subject to “optimising” pressure – so the mode of arbitrariness in them must be somewhat different.
I agree with Geoffrey Pullum that something like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar
comes nearest to capturing the actual nature of human language. It’s constructions all the way down …
It can be difficult to apply it in practical situations, though, compared with other approaches which make more or less unrealistic but simplifying assumptions about the degree of regularity in real languages. Those may be theoretically suspect, but they can be more immediately useful given our current state of knowledge. And better accounts are still going to need their descriptions of the many parts of Language that are regular.
DE, I’m still postponing reading [about] them, but as a language learner and helper or how do you call native speakers who sometimes help learners I treat a text as an inventory of “words, grammatical construction and other similar items”.
Of course any creator of learnin materials will have to think of it this way. You wrote the text, you recorded the audio and now you need a commentary. Of course you’ll have to explain both avaloù “apples” and ne …ket “ne … pas” and possibly also -où and ne. Whether you mix up words and grammatical constructions r have two subchapters for them does not really matter. You’re just explaining the learner who has just listened to a dialogue three times and going to listen a few more what she’s listening to and instead of – or in addition to – the interlinear (so she could identify words and constructions on her own) you for some reason wrote a “vocabulary” or “commentary” section.
At least for an individual text there is no need to draw the line between lexical and other units. They’re just units. (whether this line starts making sense when we speak about ALL texts where these items can be use in various functions is another question. I don’t know the answer and never really thought about it)
If this is the idea, I’m surprised it is “new”.
“Construction” is a (somewhat opaque) term of art in Construction Grammar: basically it applies to any old linkage of form and meaning, so it actually does also include lexicon. The point is not to limit the idea to the meanings attached to words, but to generalise the approach into the realm of morphology and syntax and everying else too.
People are used to the idea that the meanings attached to single words can be quirky and idiosyncratic; Construction Grammar tries to generalise that. In the process, it denies that you actually can, in the general case, separate syntax neatly from lexicon.
The ideas behind it are about as remote from Chomskyism as well can be. It can end up ignoring the fundamental social aspect of language in a similar way, though, if you’re not careful.
It’s a very ambitious project, and there are several different schools within it. It’s no monolith.
Textbook presentations on it tend to be frustrating, I find. They tend to devolve into extensive discussions of individual pet cases, and you end up feeling that you can’t see the (grammar) wood for the trees.
But I still think it’s on the right track. Just a long way to travel yet …
The “inside – outside” description of Russian aspect isn’t new; I remember the difference being described to me that way during my studies of Slavistics in the late 80s. Our professor illustrated it with a comparison from a Russian linguist (whose name I unfortunately forgot): using the imperfective aspect is like describing a 1st-of-May parade while you participate in it and can see neither it’s beginning nor it’s end; using the perfect aspect is like standing on the tribune from where you can see the parade in its entirety. (Our professor liked this comparison because it looked like someone had gone out of their way to fulfill the stereotype of what kind of comparison a good Soviet linguist would use).
So the metaphysical distinction between “seeing events from the outside” vs. “being submerged in the stream of life” looks a bit like dramaticized re-packaging of old ideas to me.
It’s pretty good as a first approximation, I think. (Works for Kusaal, too.)
So the metaphysical distinction between “seeing events from the outside” vs. “being submerged in the stream of life” looks a bit like dramaticized re-packaging of old ideas to me.
It may well be, but it was new to me, and I like it. (Also, the older I get the more it seems to me that most New and Exciting Ideas are dramaticized re-packaging of old ideas.)
1st-of-May parade
Though it is now two Slavists that subscribe to this idea, one more and as they say it will be tendency, I find it completely befuddling. When Mandelshtam writes that he “read the list of ships to the middle” is he really outside? When Pushkin says “the love has gone the boredom came” is he watching a parade from the mausoleum? And when the song wistfully goes “They were riding on troikas with little bells and far away the little lights sparkled…” the author is in the middle of the parade?
You get things like “in his seminal work Language, Bloomfield has shown that …”, which no native speaker would write. Unless they hadn’t heard the news that Leonard Bloomfield is sadly no longer with us …
i very much disagree with this. to me, the thing that makes it a slightly unusual phrasing – but not an implausible one from a cradle-tongue anglophone – is precisely the way it places the action in the past. the expected / less-marked version in that context, to my ear, would be the scholarly eternal present: “…Bloomfield shows that…”. i would, however, very much expect the deprecated version in certain contexts, which i think are mainly contrasting parallel constructions, like this: “although goethe claims in The Theory of Colors that… in his seminal work Language, Bloomfield has shown that…”
i would also expect the scholarly eternal present in a reference to the work of a writer who can safely be assumed dead (barring secret vampirism), with a past tense appearing only in reference to their life outside their work (a distinction that cuts fairly fine, as seen here: “For the first time in history, a writer [Enheduanna] used poetry not just to praise the gods but also to share details from her own life. In a handful of autobiographical verses, she recounts…”).
Well, those are two different temporal kettles of fish. The eternal present is a perfectly normal and accepted thing in its appropriate context; the use of the “has” form for the dead past is marginal though not wrong.
D.O.,
1. Я проснулся, потом я пил чай, потом залез на languagehat.com и читал одну из веток, потом…
vs.
2. Я проснулся, выпил чаю, прочёл…
Don’t they sound to you like an invitation to follow me (1) and a list of “events” (2)?
and adjacent
А мы вчера в кино ходили!
Though here perfective сходили would be somewhat subjective too.
drasvi, both of your examples are lists of events for me. Very subjectively, the second line conveys a bit more vigorous and purposeful execution of the morning routine and the first one is more relaxed and dissipated.
D.O., thanks. Gasparov’s explanation made me think of such examples but … but.
I occasionaly answer questions by Russian learners (both on the Internet and my friends), so Gasparov and I could have drifted in similar directions:)
When Pushkin says “the love has gone the boredom came” is he watching a parade from the mausoleum?
Obviously not, the mausoleum hadn’t been built back then 😉
Now without jokes, I think I actually agree with you. When you learn Russian as a foreigner, they teach you all those little rules about aspect (perfective imperative is for concrete events while imperfective is for general rules, negation triggers imperfective aspect (except when it doesn’t), etc.). When you progress beyond texts specifically created or curated to illustrate the rules, you see that native speakers frequently don’t follow these rules, and you very much would like to have some overarching rules explaining that and allowing you to always get the correct aspect. The “inside – outside” rule looks like such a rule, and when I first heard about it, it intuitively felt right. But when you actually try to apply it, it doesn’t help very much – if you want to explain why a native speaker uses this or that aspect, it gives you an unfalsifiable just-so story, and if you want to use it as a decision criterion for which aspect to use in your own utterances, it also is not of much use – indeed, are you inside or outside the parade? And you have to fall back on those partial rules or rely on your own feel for the language, however far developed at that moment.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit a unanimous consent request. I would like to substitute in the permanent RECORD that the Pushkin’s quote should read: “The love has gone, the muse came”
DO, is прошла зима настало лето спасибо партии за это by the same author?
@Hans, if I ever gave explanations similar to Gasparov’s, it was not meant as a criterion for choice between them.
Just a description of how I feel about them. (like the suggestion to stop your ears to hear the difference in voicedness or to touch the* Adam’s apple** for the same purpose that I recently read somewhere).
(Also I think I would only apply it to “how I spent yesterday evening” etc..)
*er, why “the”?
** now I wonder if it will also work for female readers. (Or they take no interest in “speech of the ʿulamāʾ of Al-Azhar”? )
Also, I’m more interested in being able to feel as native speakers do than in accuracy.
I understand that reaching accuracy comparable to that of L1 users can make me feel as they do – but I am interested in native speaker’s descriptions of their feelings even when those don’t help with accuracy:)
I guess the best idea is just repeating after them.
After having used a construction when and how they use it a million times, you will want to use it so:))
Sure: he can see where the middle is, meaning he can see the beginning and the end.
If he can see the love fade into the distance, the just-so story probably still fits…
Yes, or at least close enough to provide a close-up description.
The first sounds to me like you were drinking tea while hanging out here (as I’m doing right now…), the second like you drank all the tea before doing the next thing. But I may well be projecting English into this.
Now that I’ve finished laughing, I’ve asked my dad if he knows this one. He grew up with this genre…
It looks like Adam’s apple is secretly a compound like German Adamsapfel. There’s an even more baffling one out there that should probably be explained the same way: the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I find the scholarly eternal present very annoying, and one colleague has turned out to zealously hate it. The reason is that you don’t cite people, you cite their works; as soon as a paper is published and you can read it, it’s a thing of the past – it’s potentially outdated, and the authors themselves may have changed their views.
There are, as usual, cultural differences: the scholarly eternal present seems ubiquitous in historical linguistics, but rare in biology.
i don’t have a strong opinion about it myself; i do expect it in certain contexts, but that’s just about what i’ve read over time. i think if it’s taken seriously as a choice, rather than used reflexively, it can have some specific usefulness: to indicate that ideas are being discussed with a certain degree of abstraction, or as live and active elements of a current debate, rather than in their original context or another situation where the temporality matters. i think that’s why what came to me quickest as an illustration for the difference between “…shows…” and “…has shown…” was a comparative construction marking an abstracted claim (in eternal present) as already refuted by another analysis (in a past-tense construction that emphasizes the already-past-ness). but of course it’s mostly used with less active choice than reflex or disciplinary insistence.
@David Marjanović: My logic seems to be the opposite of yours. Mention of an author makes sense in the past tense, referring to when the person wrote or said something. However, referring to a document (which is, as you say, the normal practice) makes sense in the eternal present. The document exists,* and it says the same thing now as it did when it was first published.**
* Scholars seldom cite works like Claudius’s history of the Etruscans.
** Of course, there are caveats about works that have been retracted or corrected, as well intentionally living documents.