Punctual, treated as perfective

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Responding to Pat's note received today:

"Punctual" (as Pat notes) is indeed a subdivision,
or special case of, the perfective, exactly as Larry Trask said;
or as I would prefer to treat it,
the punctual (applied to real-world events) is a category
of events (and may be a grammatically marked category)
which is usually treated as a perfective,
if a language has a perfective / imperfective distinction.

The "punctual" is not in my view equivalent to
"treated as an indivisible unit" (as Pat thought).
It is rather a term appropriate to apply to a special kind of event,
a kind of event which in an aspectual system
is almost always treated as a perfective.

It is crucial to carefully keep the difference between
EVENTS (as they actually are in reality) and
ASPECTUAL REFERENCES
(which reflect how they are conceived by speakers).
Aspectual references are partly independent of
any real-world nature of events, they are
partly free choices made by the speaker.

***

In addition, there is a confusion between grammatical
traditions of particular languages and the tradition of
universal definitions of ideal grammatical categories.
When referring to grammatical traditions of
particular languages, we must talk about "uses" of the
term "Perfective" for a grammatical category, rather than
definitions (the definitions are secondary to the actual usages).
There is no single referent for the following.

"the traditional uses of "Perfective" "

There are many conflicting traditional uses of
grammatical categories which may all be called
"Perfective" or which may be called by some other
term. There is not only one.
What they are called may have only the most indirect
relation to the semantic ranges they cover
in actually usage.  Though usually there is a partial relation.

If on the other hand we are speaking in a single tradition
of universal definitions of ideal grammatical categories,
then the following reference can make sense:

"the traditional definition of "perfective" "

But then we must be careful NOT to include as examples
of the "perfective" any particular grammatical category
of a particular language, certainly not merely because
the tradition of THAT language calls it "Perfective".
FIRST we must demonstrate that the range of usage of that
category in that language are such as to justify it as fitting
under the term "perfective" of the universal tradition.

The Russian telic completives are not the same kind of
category as the universal category of "perfectives".
They do not cover the same semantic ranges,
though they do have a statistical correlation, completives
being more frequently treated from a "perfective" point
of view.

Pat's example:

>'Santa Claus was climbing up the chimney.'

>This verb in this sentence I consider to be perfective and durative. It
>describes a action with a definite goal which certainly does not restrict
>itself to single point of time.

works with the universal definition of "perfective" if we
substitute "telic completive" for "perfective" and possibly
"imperfective" for "durative".
the sentence does express a telic completive (aiming to
climb up the chimney), but it is regarded as an extended
space within which other events may occur, hence an imperfective.
It normally is used only when referring to a separate
event within it, that separate event usually a perfective:

'Santa Claus was climbing up the chimney
when someone lit a fire'

This is a typical imperfective within whose time span
occurs an event TREATED AS a perfective.

Russian actually has this combination in
a typical telic completive verb
     (marked by the prefix for the attainment of goal)
in a rare imperfective form
     (marked by a suffix most often -ivat', -yvat' ).

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson