<html><head></head><body> <div dir="auto">Hi Sergey,</div><div dir="auto">Not just Chinese (i.e. Mandarin), but most of Sinitic and Sino-Tibetan “<span style="font-style: normal; ; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; ; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; ; ; ;Times New Roman", serif; ; ; float: none; display: inline !important;">encodes only aspectual meanings, with tense always inferred pragmatically as an implicature .”</span></div><div dir="auto">The controversies come up when made up sentences rather than natural data in context are used, and so it is easy to “show” tense distinctions that are actually just the pragmatic implicatures you mentioned. </div><div dir="auto">Cross-linguistically there is also poor understanding of the difference between tense and aspect, and so, for example, English “going to/gonna” is talked about as tense. </div> <div><br></div><div dir="auto">Randy</div><div dir="auto"><br></div>On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 4:13 AM, Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <<a class="" href="mailto:On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 4:13 AM, Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <<a href=">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote type="cite" class="protonmail_quote"> <div dir="auto">
Sure, Chinese seems to be a parade example of this feature in the literature
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On Mon, 28 Jul 2025, 22:57 Artem Fedorinchyk, <
<a rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" href="mailto:artem.fedorinqyk@gmail.com">artem.fedorinqyk@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
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Maybe Chinese is not the best example in terms of coding aspects but not tenses but it comes quite close.
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On Mon, 28 Jul 2025 at 20:42, Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <
<a target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:
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<p style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;margin-right:0in;margin-left:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Dear Christian,</p>
<p style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;margin-right:0in;margin-left:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="color:black">Thanks you for your message! Indeed, German is well known for lacking grammatical aspect. But are there languages whose verbal morphology (along with productive periphrastic constructions) encodes only aspectual meanings, with tense always inferred pragmatically as an implicature?</span></p>
<p style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;margin-right:0in;margin-left:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="color:black">Best,</span></p>
<p style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;margin-right:0in;margin-left:0in;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span style="color:black">Sergey</span></p>
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On Sun, 27 Jul 2025 at 19:21, Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <
<a target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:
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<p>Dear Sergey,</p>
<p>you may wish to specify your question. First of all, there are languages without any aspect at all, e.g. German. Second, there are languages with more than two aspects at the same morphological level, e.g. Yucatec Maya. So what exactly is the question?</p>
<p>Cheers, Christian</p>
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Am 27.07.2025 um 17:20 schrieb Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp:
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<p style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Dear colleagues,</span></p>
<p style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Please allow me a naïve question: do we believe in a one-feature binary opposition of “perfective” vs. “imperfective” aspect in languages that, unlike English (e.g., yesterday he wrote ~ yesterday he was writing) or Spanish (ayer escribió ~ ayer estaba escribiendo), do not exhibit a clear-cut morphological distinction of this kind within the same tense, if I may put it as simply as possible?</span></p>
<p style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Thank you very much!</span></p>
<p style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Sergey</span></p>
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