Perfective-Imperfective

[Vidhyanath Rao]

proto-language <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

> "The hamster (has) climbed up behind the bookcase."
> [other examples deleted] All above are equally "perfective".

> "The hamster (has) climbed behind the bookcase."
>  [other examples deleted] All above are equally "imperfective",
> or would normally be construed so.

> I am sure any of our list-members who command Russian will
> subscribe to this basic division.

Ah, but if you want to see the aorist-imperfect distinction of Modern
Greek, Bulgarian, OCS or the perfectum-imperfectum of Latin as expressing
perfective-imperfective distinction, the above is simply wrong. In Dahl's
questionaire, ``My brother wrote (an indeterminate set of) letters.'' was
translated using aorist. That it would be so in OCS or Latin is as certain
as anything concerning non-living languages can be. Most linguists do not
want to deny the status of perfective to the aorists and hence they need
to come up with a better definition.

[The case of Greek is insteresting. If, as sometime claimed in
IE-aspectology, verbs such as `I worked' were expressed in PIE (or
proto-Greek) using the imperfect, when did the change occur?]

> Once one has the correct definitions in mind, one can see why Lehmann has no
> hesitation in attributing to the IE injunctive (-perfective, +durative), to
> the aorist (+perfective, + momentary), to the perfect
> (+perfectuve, -momentary) (Winfred Lehmann, Proto-Indo-European Syntax,
> Austin, 1974).

I presume that you meant `imperfect' instead of `injunctive'. Anyway, the
characterization of perfect is beyond the pale. Perfect can denote the
state, and the most wide-spread example `*woida' does. And states are
supposed to be as imperfective as they come. [Kurylowicz's version, that
perfect is a complex construct combining imperfective and perfective, is
better.]