Introduction

The visual connotation of the English term aspect is surpassed in Slavistic circles by that of the term vid, which means ‘appearance’, or ‘view’. The need to formalize exactly the representations of our basic stock of examples, such as the sentences in (47)–(52), cannot but lead into a position in which a visual connotation is appropriate, in particular by an appeal to the notion of perspective. This is partly due to the technical decision to make the extensional logic underlying the plug-representations partly intensional. In particular, the notion world in Intensional Logic (IL) makes it possible to admit intensional objects into the domain: they are defined as functions from worlds to entities of some sort, whose extension can be obtained by applying this function at a given world-index w. It is not difficult and even illuminating to make this characterization of these abstract semantic objects concrete by imagining oneself to have a look from w into the domain where this extension is present.

In my view, aspect construal should indeed be analysed in terms of perspective, in the sense that indices are playing a crucial role in determining sentential aspect, where index is the neutral term for semantic entities on which other semantic entities are made dependent. To the set of indices belong numbers, worlds, models, intervals, situations, points, etc. Perspective comes in at the moment at which it depends on the choice of an index whether or not a sentence is used to express terminative aspect or durative aspect.