[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Sergey Loesov]

Dear Christian,

Thanks you for your message! Indeed, German is well known for lacking
grammatical aspect. But are there languages whose verbal morphology (along
with productive periphrastic constructions) encodes only aspectual
meanings, with tense always inferred pragmatically as an implicature?

Best,

Sergey

On Sun, 27 Jul 2025 at 19:21, Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Dear Sergey,
>
> you may wish to specify your question. First of all, there are languages
> without any aspect at all, e.g. German. Second, there are languages with
> more than two aspects at the same morphological level, e.g. Yucatec Maya.
> So what exactly is the question?
>
> Cheers, Christian
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Am 27.07.2025 um 17:20 schrieb Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp:
>
> 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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