[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Dan I Slobin]

The  Präteritumschwund is manifest in Yiddish, using the perfect as the
sole past tense.

Dan


On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 9:12 AM Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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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>


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*Dan I. Slobin *

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*Distinguished **Affiliated **Professor Emeritus of Linguistics*

*University of California, Berkeley*

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