[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Christian Lehmann]

Jürgen, quoting you:

> I have not actually seen a language that would be entirely free of 
> morphosyntactic constraints on viewpoint aspectual interpretation. 
> Even Finnish and German, the languages commonly cited as lacking 
> grammaticalized viewpoint aspect markers, have a perfect form (which 
> in German is most commonly used to express past reference, but retains 
> polysemy as a post-state/time marker). Colloquial German in addition 
> has a weakly grammaticalized progressive construction for atelic VPs.
>
First, a little dispute with you on this: Limiting our classification of 
languages to a determined variety of a language, we shall say that the 
progressive construction is alien to standard German. The more 
interesting, because more general, question seems to be whether the 
German perfect, apart from being a tense, has some aspectual value. 
Let's say that this value consists in signalling relevance at topic 
time. E.g.:

  * Ich habe Joghurt gekauft. 'I bought yogurt [which is probably of
    current interest to you].'
  * Ich kaufte Joghurt. 'I bought yogurt [which is one of the things
    that happened at that time].'

This is a semantic feature of the perfect in some other languages I have 
seen. The question is: Does it come under the notion of aspect? Let 
tense be the grammatical marking of the temporal relationship of a 
situation to some temporal reference point, and aspect the grammatical 
marking of the viewpoint taken as to the temporal structure of the 
situation in itself; then current relevance appears to be related, if 
anything, more closely to tense than to aspect. However, this is not 
actually a logical situation of tertium non datur; there are some more 
verbal categories, and for some of them we may even yet be lacking a 
general concept.

-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
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