"Perfective" definition

[ECOLING at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/2/99 1:36:12 AM, vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes
as quoted in the second paragraph below.

My own intro explanation:
Referring to the Athabaskan language Slave:
I have added the quotation marks to highlight where I think the
use of terms has confused things, and added the brackets to clarify
a bit more closely what is actually being referred to, I would think.
In any case, unless we understand such an admittedly complex
language's system very thoroughly, it is not advisable to try to use
it as a counterexample to anything.

>It
>seems strange to say that the perfective marker ignores the internal
>structure of the event specified by the "continuative" [directed durative]
"marker" [? event or Aktionsart], while the
>imperfective marker pays attention to it.

Then...

>A simpler example is possible if you will let me use hypothetical
>languages: Consider one, with aspect,  in which `shake' is formed with
>a morpheme that generally indicates iteration. [I got this idea from a
>description of reduplication in Dakota, but it is said not to have tense
>or aspect.] `I shook the tree. Apples fell down.' would be expressed using
>a perfective. But the action of shaking involves iteration as make
>explicit by the form. Same thing might go for `walk' (iterative of
>`step'). What should we do in this case?

This is no dilemma at all.  A Perfective can be something which has
an internal iterative in the fact of the event,
and the iterative or durative can thus be Aktionsart not Aspect.
The Aktionsart, or the event itself, always takes at least some time duration,
even for "explode" etc.  But that DOES NOT FORCE the thinking human
being to treat it as having internal structure in the DISCOURSE.
The internal structure may be purely lexical, irrelevant to the DISCOURSE
ASPECT (point of view) of the speaker, who is "treating it as an
indivisible whole" or "indivisible unit" -- the two are the same thing as far
as I understand the use of ordinary language in this context.

The point is, yet again, that the nature of the real world does NOT
determine what aspect is appropriate.  The speaker's point of view,
the function in the discourse, determines that.
Saying that some action "really has" internal structure simply cannot
count as evidence that a perfective does not mean what its definition
says it means.  Reality is not the point.  Thought is.

Language reflects thought,
and thought reflects reality,
language does not reflect reality directly, but only indirectly.

My experience is that every linguist who ends up learning what
Aspect is goes through a painful process of developing this
concept of the independence of aspectual concepts from the
physical facts of reality.  The physical facts of reality do
influence the STATISTICAL occurrence of aspectual categories,
but only that.  We must prove what was in the mind of the speaker
or writer in order to discover the correlation of meaning with
the forms of particular aspectual categories, or even to show
that a grammatical category actually is an aspectual category,
rather than being lexical Aktionsart (not discourse) or something else.

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson