[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

Mon Aug 4 15:26:02 UTC 2025

Thank you, Dan! Spanish can indeed do it.
In this connection, I  was also thinking about Spanish futures.
If I say, "Lo haré mañana", to which aspect shall we assign this utterance?
Speculatively, we can form  "Lo voy a estar haciendo mañana", or, vice
versa,  "Lo habré hecho mañana", but people do not really talk this way, at
least in my experience.

 Is "Lo haré mañana" aspect-neutral?

The same picture seems to hold true for standard Italian: "Lo farò domani".
And maybe for English as well?  How often do we need to say "I will be
doing it tomorrow"?

Best,

Sergey
On Mon, 4 Aug 2025, 06:08 Dan I Slobin, <slobin at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Here's another quirk from Spanish, a language with a rich collection of
> tense/aspect forms. It is possible to take two perspectives on a past
> durative event in a narrative, considering the event as continuing or as a
> completed durative process. The past progressive is formed with *estar*
> ‘be’ + PRESENT.PARTICIPLE. The past auxiliary *estar* can be either
> imperfective (*estaba*) or perfective (*estuvo*). For example, consider a
> story in which a search (*buscar*) is ongoing: *estaba buscando*
> indicates continuous searching throughout the story. However, if the search
> is completed before the end of the story, *estuvo buscando *indicates the
> total duration of an event that had been extended in time earlier in the
> narrative. Both forms translate in English as "was searching."
>
>
>
> This is not a matter of an imperfective-perfective continuum, but rather a
> matter of treating an imperfective past situation as bounded or unbounded.
>
>
> - Dan
>
>
>
> Sebastián, E., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Development of linguistic forms:
> Spanish. In R. A. Berman & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), *Relating events in
> narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study *(pp. 239-284)*.*
> Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
>
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 7:08 AM Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp <
> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
>> Dear Adam – Just adding a few references:
>>
>>
>>
>> There is definitely a perfective-imperfective continuum as far as the
>> likelihood of different lexical/situational-aspectual classes to occur with
>> (im)perfective reference goes. This is explored in Becker & Malchukov
>> (2022), which builds, among other things, upon observations in Bohnemeyer &
>> Swift (2004).
>>
>>
>>
>> The correlation between perfective aspect and foregrounding and
>> non-perfective aspect and backgrounding was pointed out long ago by Hopper
>> (1982) and by the early DRT literature. An account that dispenses with the
>> stipulations of the DRT framework is developed in Bohnemeyer (2009).
>>
>>
>>
>> Best – Juergen
>>
>>
>>
>> Becker, L. & A. Malchukov. (2022). Semantic maps and typological
>> hierarchies: Evidence for the Actionality Hierarchy. *Zeitschrift für
>> Sprachwissenschaft* 41(1): 31-66. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2021-2044
>>
>>
>>
>> Bohnemeyer, J. (2009). Temporal anaphora in a tenseless language. In W.
>> Klein & P. Li (eds.), *The expression of time in language*. Berlin:
>> Mouton de Gruyter. 83-128. Preprint
>> <http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/MdG_ECC-Time_04_Bohnemeyer.pdf>.
>>
>>
>>
>> Bohnemeyer, J. & M. Swift. (2004). Event realization and default aspect*.
>> Linguistics and* *Philosophy *27(3): 263-296. Preprint
>> <http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/LING482_02_final.pdf>. Errata
>> <http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/defaultaspect-corrections.pdf>.
>>
>>
>>
>> Hopper, P. J. (1982). Aspect between discourse and grammar: An
>> introductory essay for the volume. In P. J. Hopper (ed.), *Tense-aspect:
>> Between semantics and pragmatics. Containings the contributions to a
>> symposium on tense and aspect, held at UCLA, May 1979*. Amsterdam:
>> Benjamins. 3-18.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
>> Professor, Department of Linguistics
>> University at Buffalo
>>
>> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
>> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
>> Phone: (716) 645 0127
>> Fax: (716) 645 3825
>> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
>> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>>
>> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585
>> 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
>>
>> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
>> (Leonard Cohen)
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
>> Adam James Ross Tallman via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> *Date: *Thursday, July 31, 2025 at 02:51
>> *To: *Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com>
>> *Cc: *LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <
>> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> *Subject: *Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective
>> aspect
>>
>> Hi Sergey,
>>
>>
>>
>> Me and Andres Salanova worked on this problem a little, so *maybe* our
>> project relates to your question.
>>
>>
>>
>> We wondered whether there was a continuum (or in whether it is useful to
>> posit a continuum) between perfective and imperfective somehow, but
>> couldn't make much sense of this idea in the end.
>>
>>
>>
>> One way of approaching it, which we chose in the end, is by just deciding
>> that perfective = narrative time advancement, and imperfective = no
>> narrative time advancement, operationalizing this distinction so it can be
>> coded in naturalistic speech and seeing with which morphemes it correlates.
>> The degree to which a morpheme or construction correlates that distinction
>> is the degree to which it is perfective or imperfective.
>>
>>
>>
>> Fairly descriptive, but we thought it might be a starting point for
>> investigating typological variation. A proceedings paper is available
>> here. <http://www.ddl.cnrs.fr/fulltext/DDL/Salanova_2022.pdf> (if the
>> link doesn't work let me know)
>>
>>
>>
>> I thought that it would correlate a lot with lexical aspects, e.g. you
>> just tend to get imperfective readings more in contexts where you have
>> stative verbs. But we didn't have enough data to assess this I think. It
>> turns out in Chácobo the past tense marker is the most consistently
>> correlated with narrative time advancement and in Araona its whether you
>> use a verbal or nonverbal predicate construction (nonverbal predicate
>> constructions are associated with narrative time non-advancement
>> naturally). Something similar was found for Mebengokre.
>>
>>
>>
>> But, I'd be very interested to hear if anyone was able to somehow measure
>> (im)perfectivity using a different conceptual-measurement framework. I
>> think this work remained pretty preliminary.
>>
>>
>>
>> best,
>>
>>
>>
>> A.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 5:20 PM Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <
>> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> Please allow me a naïve question: do we believe in a one-feature binary
>> opposition of “perfective” vs. “imperfective” aspect in languages that,
>> unlike English (e.g., yesterday he wrote ~ yesterday he was writing) or
>> Spanish (ayer escribió ~ ayer estaba escribiendo), do not exhibit a
>> clear-cut morphological distinction of this kind within the same tense, if
>> I may put it as simply as possible?
>>
>> Thank you very much!
>>
>> Sergey
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Adam J.R. Tallman
>>
>> Post-doctoral Researcher
>>
>> Friedrich Schiller Universität
>>
>> Department of English Studies
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>>
>
>
> --
>
> *<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> *
>
> *Dan I. Slobin *
>
> *Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and *
>
> *Distinguished **Affiliated **Professor Emeritus of Linguistics*
>
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>
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>
>
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