[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Sergey Loesov]

Does *Präteritumschwund* in spoken German have any bearing on examples from
Standard German, or is the question unimportant?

On Mon, 4 Aug 2025 at 17:17, Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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