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<p>Jürgen, quoting you:</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-family:"CMU Serif"">I have not
actually seen a language that would be entirely free of
morphosyntactic constraints on viewpoint aspectual
interpretation. Even Finnish and German, the languages
commonly cited as lacking grammaticalized viewpoint aspect
markers, have a perfect form (which in German is most
commonly used to express past reference, but retains
polysemy as a post-state/time marker). Colloquial German in
addition has a weakly grammaticalized progressive
construction for atelic VPs. </span></p>
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<p>First, a little dispute with you on this: Limiting our
classification of languages to a determined variety of a language,
we shall say that the progressive construction is alien to
standard German. The more interesting, because more general,
question seems to be whether the German perfect, apart from being
a tense, has some aspectual value. Let's say that this value
consists in signalling relevance at topic time. E.g.:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ich habe Joghurt gekauft. 'I bought yogurt [which is probably
of current interest to you].'</li>
<li>Ich kaufte Joghurt. 'I bought yogurt [which is one of the
things that happened at that time].'</li>
</ul>
<p>This is a semantic feature of the perfect in some other languages
I have seen. The question is: Does it come under the notion of
aspect? Let tense be the grammatical marking of the temporal
relationship of a situation to some temporal reference point, and
aspect the grammatical marking of the viewpoint taken as to the
temporal structure of the situation in itself; then current
relevance appears to be related, if anything, more closely to
tense than to aspect. However, this is not actually a logical
situation of tertium non datur; there are some more verbal
categories, and for some of them we may even yet be lacking a
general concept.</p>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span></p>
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