Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- How to use this book
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Reflexivity and reflexive marking
- 3 Pronominal gender
- 4 Pronominal case
- 5 Determiners
- 6 Tense marking
- 7 Aspect marking
- 8 Modal verbs
- 9 Negation
- 10 Subject-verb agreement
- 11 Ditransitive constructions
- 12 Interrogative constructions
- 13 The formation of relative clauses
- 14 Summary and outlook
- General references
- Index of languages, varieties, and areas
- Index of names
- Subject index
- References
7 - Aspect marking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- How to use this book
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Reflexivity and reflexive marking
- 3 Pronominal gender
- 4 Pronominal case
- 5 Determiners
- 6 Tense marking
- 7 Aspect marking
- 8 Modal verbs
- 9 Negation
- 10 Subject-verb agreement
- 11 Ditransitive constructions
- 12 Interrogative constructions
- 13 The formation of relative clauses
- 14 Summary and outlook
- General references
- Index of languages, varieties, and areas
- Index of names
- Subject index
- References
Summary
We opened the previous chapter with a description of the grammatical category of tense, which achieves a location of situations in time relative to the time of utterance (moment of speaking), or some other temporal reference point. We will continue this discussion in the present chapter, but will shift the focus to the internal temporal properties of the situation described by a sentence and the grammatical means available for portraying them. The label conventionally used for such grammatical marking is ‘aspect’. Comrie (1976: 3) defines aspects as ‘different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’. The temporal properties that we will be interested in involve central parameters of the situation described, especially such parameters as boundedness, completion, continuity, repetition, inception, and progressiveness, as well as some others. Moreover, these temporal properties are not objective, but, crucially, depend on how a speaker construes a real-world situation in their mind, or, put differently, how they view the situation. Aspect, thus, is a highly subjective category insofar as it allows the speaker to highlight different temporal properties of a situation, and to portray a situation in different ways.
Overview
We stated above that the term ‘aspect’ relates to grammatical exponents. As with tense marking, not all languages have aspects, but all languages can express aspectual distinctions by lexical means. For example, the contrast between perfective and imperfective situations in German may be expressed by a prepositional construction, as shown in (1), even though German lacks a corresponding grammatical aspect. We may translate (1a) into English using the simple past and render (1b) with the progressive aspect.
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- Varieties of EnglishA Typological Approach, pp. 134 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013