aspect question

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Stephanie Briggs wrote:

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

As far as I'm concerned (as an English speaker), watching doesn't have 
any inherent aspect; it conforms to the context. For purposes of 
English, the Russian desire to assign every verb to one or the other 
aspect is irrelevant. And the fact that смотреть/посмотреть form a 
well-balanced aspect pair (both are valid options in common use) shows 
that Russian doesn't conceive of this activity as inherently perfective 
or imperfective.

As I wrote privately to Prof. Gladney:

It depends on your understanding of "jump." If it denotes the 
instantaneous event when the feet separate from the ground, then it has 
no duration, and neither does the watching. But if it denotes the jump 
plus the fall -- the entire trip -- then the watching does have duration 
and might admit an imperfective sense. Compare "I watched him jump 
across the puddle," where "jump" denotes the entire trip. But I still 
conceive of that перескок (grammatically) as an instantaneous event with 
no internal structure or duration.

[end quote]

On further reflection, we can force a jump to have internal structure by 
specifying stages or intervening events:

I watched him jump across the puddle, and I saw the change fall out of 
his pocket midway across, but he didn't have time to catch it before he 
landed.

A moment later, Stephanie Briggs wrote:

> "I watched him jump off the cliff."
>
> OK, we could deal with this a number of ways (forgive me for being
> somewhat fascinated by the macabre subject!):
>
> It could mean:
>
> 1) I watched him jump off the cliff but I didn't necessarily stick
> around to hear him scream all the way to the bottom. (perfective, short
> duration, no emphasis on result)
>
> 2) I watched him jump off the cliff, then went to the edge and continued
> to watch as he screamed his way to the bottom. (imperfective: prolonged
> period of watching)
>
> 3) I watched him jump off the cliff, specifically with the intent of
> going to the edge and relishing watching him hit the bottom and go
> splat. (perfective? because the watcher is most interested in the result)
>
> Then if you want to change things to "was watching 1, 2, or 3, then we
> could go there, in which case, the aspect could be leaning more towards
> imperfective in all the examples.

In all these cases, I have a really hard time accepting the progressive, 
for two reasons: 1) it denotes an event in progress, but as we've seen I 
conceptualize the departure as instantaneous; 2) it suggests an 
intervening event, interruption, etc. that precedes completion, but none 
is specified. In order to accept the progressive, I need to hear that 
"jump" denotes the entire trip, thus:

I was watching him jump off the cliff onto the sandbar below when I 
heard his girlfriend call out....

> (I'm not nuts, really!)

Well, we've just watched you jump off the deep end, but we haven't yet 
seen how you land. So for the moment, I'm suspending my disbelief that 
you may be nuts. ;-)

-- 
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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