Difficult Perfective-Imperfective

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Pat, I am not at all sure I understand you,
or that you are indeed making the distinctions needed.
It will take a lot of work for me to try again.

The chief problem is that we have BOTH the
issue of translation of terminology between us,
AND the issue of analysis of particular usages.
I think until we get the terminology issue straightened out
for spoken languages known from direct evidence,
currently living ones, it is probably counterproductive
to bring in anything at all concerning ancient Indo-European
aorists etc.

***

Can you provide a table of translations?
There are actually THREE categories which are distinct.

Pat (you) use
perfective / imperfective as synonymous with Russian telic / atelic (??)
and use momentary / durative for the discourse-aspects (??)
then what do you use for the two of the Aktionsart categories
     (various, not just two) which are closest to the aspectual categories?

Comrie, Trask, Anderson use
and telic/atelic for the Russian categories,
and perfective / imperfective for what Pat calls momentary / durative.
punctual (momentary) / durative for two of the Aktionsart categories
     (there are others like state, process, activity, etc.)

Is that anywhere close?

***

In the meantime (I am not sure this is relevant to our debate):

>While he ate up the bread, I drank (telic, durative).

This is quite odd, in English, unless my imagination
is failing this afternoon.  It ought to be

>While he ate the bread, I drank

(in other words, telic completive is incompatible with
what I call imperfective, the background, unless it is iterative or etc.,
or is expressed as progressive (in English):

>While he was eating up the bread, I drank.

The second clause can be either perfective or imperfective (my terms).

The sentence as you gave it

>While he ate up the bread, I drank (telic, durative).

tends to force me to an interpretation of contrast, rather than time,
for the "while", that is, during some time, he ate up the bread,
but I, by contrast, drank (the entire time, possibly),
not contained within his eating the bread.

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson