aspect question

[Stephanie Briggs]

What about something like "I was watching TV when the doorbell rang." - the
action (watching) that gets interrupted would be perfective.

~Stephanie

On 20 February 2013 22:45, Paul B. Gallagher <paulbg at pbg-translations.com>wrote:

> Tatiana Filimonova wrote:
>
>  Doesn't "watching" imply a continuing action?  Something more in line
>> with:
>> Я смотрел(а), как она бросает мяч.
>> or
>> Я смотрел(а), как она бросала мяч.
>> or
>> Я смотрел(а), как она бросила мяч.
>>
>> It would depend on whether "she" was throwing the ball repeatedly, or
>> just threw it once.
>>
>
> For me, "watch" differs essentially from "see" in that "watch" denotes
> conscious attention directed at the target. Often, that is associated with
> prolonged processes, but not necessarily: "I watched him jump off the
> cliff."
>
> As a nonnative speaker of Russian, I would have been more inclined to use
> смотреть for Prof. Gladney's case, but I was not surprised to see видеть in
> the first response from a Russian. The boundary between the two Russian
> verbs is not precisely the same as the boundary between the two English
> verbs.
>
> As to your solutions, my understanding of the English admits the first two
> possibilities -- the throwing could have happened once or repeatedly. Of
> course, it is illogical to think that the throwing could have happened
> before the watching. ;-) But with a different main verb:
>
> Я узнал(а), как она бросила мяч.
>
> it is quite possible that the throwing preceded the learning by some time.
> A clearer case:
>
> Я только позавчера узнал(а), как Советский Союз распал.
>
> If we substitute смотреть here, the listener/reader can only make sense of
> the sentence by assuming we were watching a recording of the event and not
> the live event itself:
>
> I was just watching the fall of the Soviet Union (on TV) the other day.
>
> --
> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
> --
> Paul B. Gallagher
> pbg translations, inc.
> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
> http://pbg-translations.com
>
>
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