[Lingtyp] Comments on aspectuality theme session call

[Johanna NICHOLS]

Thanks to all who have commented on our theme session proposal, on the
list and in private.  We received more suggestions of further
bibliography and issues than could be accommodated in a 500-word
abstract.  Since most of the comments concerned recent work in or on
Russian, and I'm the only one of the co-organizers who reads Russian,
I'll reply briefly.

Several mentioned that Tatevosov 2016 (in Russian) should have been
cited.  Right.  I wasn't aware of the book (which I don't see in any
North American library that participates in interlibrary loan with
UC).  I happen to be in Helsinki where the (superb) National Library
has a copy and I skimmed it yesterday.  It's a wonderful study giving
a comprehensive, detailed, theoretically well grounded description of
the actionality systems of three languages, all based on extensive
elicitation plus good lexical and grammatical resources.  Highly
recommended (and we hope to see a review of it in English in LT), but
our concerns for the theme session are different:  What other
distinctions, lexical classes, etc. exist and how do we work them into
a comprehensive theory?  What will work for a large cross-linguistic
survey? (Applying anything like Tatevosov's system to a large enough
sample to reveal, say, macroareal frequency differences, family and
areal biases, correlations, etc. would take decades.)

Somewhat similarly for the extensive and excellent work on Slavic
aspect and the lexical classes it reveals.  These too are hard to
apply cross-linguistically.

It seems to us that e.g. a fieldworker aiming at completing a good
overall description in a three-year funding window usually has to fall
back on the simpler, less labor-intensive systems like Vendler's,
despite their known inadequacy.  As a result, descriptions of
actionality systems haven't grown apace with the flourishing of field
and descriptive grammars in recent years.  We hope to contribute to
the ability of grammar writers to build up a body of cross-linguistic
work in this area as well.

These and other concerns you've raised will be worked into the
submission version of our proposal, to the extent possible.  For the
record we'll circulate a revised version in a couple of days.

On terminology:  We used "aspectuality" (rather than our preferred
"actionality") in the subject line and title because we thought it was
more transparent to non-specialists.  (Doesn't "actionality" suggest
valence, agency, etc.?)

Johanna  (also for Thera and Bastian)