[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Christian Lehmann]

As far as I know, that Präteritumschwund is a feature characterizing the 
Bavarian dialect. For instance, it does not occur in my variety of 
colloquial German.

But where it does occur, it is obviously loss of the feature of 
'relevance to topic time' from the perfect tense, which renders it 
synonymous with the past tense and thus able to replace (renew) it.

Am 04.08.2025 um 17:32 schrieb 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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-- 

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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