Is it of much use?

[Goloviznin Konstantin]

08 марта 2012, 21:44 от Emily Saunders <emilka at MAC.COM>:
> In discussing Russian aspect with some students the other night and
> the verb "to read" in particular, it came up that the presence of
> other words in the sentence (inclusion of the object, time adjectives,
> etc.) affects the aspectual meaning of the English verb to a large
> extent.
> 
> For instance
> He read - is a statement that the action occurred - он читал
> He read the book - is necessarily perfective - it implies he finished
> the book - Он прочитал книгу.
> 
> BUT
> 
> He read HIS book last night....  -- isn't quite so clear cut as to
> whether the book was finished and most likely it wasn't.
> 
> The proposed system could be a useful aid for those studying English
> -- and in classifying present perfect as a form of the present tense
> -- for Russian learners in particular.  But I don't think that the
> English verb tense system by itself can match the Russian aspectual
> one without a lot of qualifiers.
> 
> My rough two cents,
> 
> Emily Saunders
> 
> On 08.03.2012, at 7:33, anne marie devlin wrote:
> 

...try to make this discussion wider.

Telling the truth I've been thinking for long on making universal
description-algorithm on studying any language. Got the following
about this.

Firstly, any language we compress to only a dot-like definition: any
language is a description of ...  Then this definition inflate into the first layer. This layer is under 
mathematics-like rules: 2+2 = 4 or  very close to 4. This layer is more 
theoretical (but more practical than any standart grammar).  Around this layer we shape the second one
standing under: we have some strictful rules to ... trespass them.
Here 2+2 can be 4.5, 5.0 or even 5.5.  This system can be called
"two-layered perl".

Then acording this idilogy we have:

In the first layer: He read - is a statement that the action occurred
- он прочитал (always in any context).
In the second layer: He read - is a statement that the action occurred
- can be он прочитал  or он читал (according the context we have).
Adding needed qualifiers and modifyers we get all tints and colors.

The same can be done for - He read HIS book last night. This way we
may get rid of "russian salad" having come to something like "ordnung ist
ordnung" ;)

Konstantin.

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