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<p class="p1">Dear Christian — Suppose viewpoint aspect is understood as a mapping between topic time and some part of the described situation, as has become the consensus across an impressive range of mainstream approaches (leaving aside the precise definition
of the notion of topic time), including Chung & Timberlake (1985), Smith (1991), Kamp & Reyle (1993), Klein (1994), and others. Then logically, i.e., if you will, as an etic grid, you get the following possible relations:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<ul style="margin-top:0in" type="disc">
<li class="li1" style="mso-list:l1 level1 lfo2">Topic time may include the described situation. This means all parts of the described situation proper are entailed to be realized, but there is no pre- or post-state reference. This matches common intuitions
about perfectivity closely.<o:p></o:p></li><li class="li1" style="mso-list:l1 level1 lfo2">The described situation may include topic time. This means the situation started before topic time, and its completion lies beyond topic time and is not part of the evaluation of the utterance vis-à-vis topic
time. Which for assertions means that the completion is not entailed. This matches the common understanding of imperfective/progressive semantics closely.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></li><li class="li1" style="mso-list:l1 level1 lfo2">Topic time may include a pre-state of the described situation. This means that what matters for the evaluation of the utterance is a state that is a causal prerequisite of the described situation, but doesn’t
out of context necessarily entail the realization of the described situation. This fits rather well with the semantics of prospective aspects such as the English _be going to_ construction and its Romance counterparts.<o:p></o:p></li><li class="li1" style="mso-list:l1 level1 lfo2">Topic time may include a post-state of the described situation, i.e., a state that results from it. This can be the target/result state of a described state change, or a state of experience some agent makes, or
an existentially quantified proposition that becomes true as a result of the described event, such as ‘George Washington has slept here’.<o:p></o:p></li></ul>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">(I argued in Bohnemeyer 2002 that we should include two further possibilities into consideration, namely that topic time includes solely the initial or solely the terminal boundary of the described situation.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Now, I’m fairly optimistic that I can make a convincing case that anything put forth under the notion of ‘current relevance’ can be explained in terms of that post-state aspect described under the fourth bullet point.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">What this means, among other things, is that if you want the perfect to be a tense, my question is what do you do with that notional post-state aspect I described above, which seems to account rather well for the behavior we expect of perfects
? Does it for some reason not exist, even though it sure seems eerily familiar? Or is there some independent reason that we should call it a tense, even though its existence happens to be predicted by a family of theories of viewpoint aspect, as I just demonstrated?<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">An additional complication: If we view tense as constraining topic time in terms of its relation to utterance time or some reference time, as argued in Klein (1994) (and Bohnemeyer 2014), we arrive at the prediction that viewpoint aspect ought
to be orthogonal to tense, and in first approximation, all viewpoint aspects ought to be expressible in all tenses. Which then gets us to the question of the relation among future perfect, present perfect, and pluperfect. If these are pure (absolute-relative)
tenses that do not conflate a component of viewpoint aspect, then how do we account for their shared properties?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Best — Juergen<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Bohnemeyer, J. (2002). <i>The grammar of time reference in Yukatek Maya</i>. Munich: LINCOM.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Bohnemeyer, J. (2014). Aspect vs. relative tense: The case reopened.
<i>Natural Language and Linguistic Theory</i> 32(3):<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p1">917-954.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Chung, S., & A. Timberlake. (1985). Tense, aspect, and mood. In T. Shopen (Ed.),
<i>Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 202-258.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Kamp, H. & U. Reyle. (1993). <i>From discourse to logic</i>. Dordrecht: Kluwer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Klein, W. (1994). <i>Time in language</i>. London: Routledge.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="p2"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="p1">Smith, C. S. (1991). <i>The parameter of aspect</i>. Dordrecht: Kluwer.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"CMU Serif""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"CMU Serif""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black">Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)<br>
Professor, Department of Linguistics<br>
University at Buffalo <br>
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Web: </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><a href="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/" title="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:#0563C1">http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/</span></a></span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black"> <br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">-- <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-family:"CMU Serif""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-family:"CMU Serif""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<b><span style="color:black">From: </span></b><span style="color:black">Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Date: </b>Monday, August 4, 2025 at 16:35<br>
<b>To: </b>LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Subject: </b>Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p style="margin-left:.5in">Jürgen, quoting you:<o:p></o:p></p>
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<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><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p style="margin-left:.5in">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.:<o:p></o:p></p>
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<![if !supportLists]><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>Ich habe Joghurt gekauft. 'I bought yogurt [which is probably of current interest to you].'<o:p></o:p></p>
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<![if !supportLists]><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>Ich kaufte Joghurt. 'I bought yogurt [which is one of the things that happened at that time].'<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-left:.5in">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in">-- <o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.5pt">Tel.:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.5pt">+49/361/2113417<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.5pt">E-Post:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.5pt"><a href="mailto:christianw_lehmann@arcor.de">christianw_lehmann@arcor.de</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.5pt">Web:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.5pt"><a href="https://www.christianlehmann.eu/">https://www.christianlehmann.eu</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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