[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

Tue Aug 5 07:07:04 UTC 2025

Hi Dan – While I know that these forms exist, I’m not clear on how they differ from the more synthetic Preterito Indefinido (buscó) and Imperfecto (buscaba). In first approximation, estaba buscando should mean the same as buscaba and estuvo buscando should mean the same as buscó. We might hypothesize that the more analytical forms with estar are in an early stage of renewing the synthetic forms. Do you see any evidence of this in the Frog Stories? – Best – Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Dan I Slobin <slobin at berkeley.edu>
Date: Monday, August 4, 2025 at 05:08
To: Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Cc: Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu>, Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com>, LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect
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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<mailto: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<mailto: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)
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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Adam James Ross Tallman via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Date: Thursday, July 31, 2025 at 02:51
To: Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com<mailto:sergeloesov at gmail.com>>
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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<mailto: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
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Friedrich Schiller Universität
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Dan I. Slobin

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