[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Sergey Loesov]

Sure, Chinese seems to be a parade example of this feature in the literature

On Mon, 28 Jul 2025, 22:57 Artem Fedorinchyk, <artem.fedorinqyk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Maybe Chinese is not the best example in terms of coding aspects but not
> tenses but it comes quite close.
>
> On Mon, 28 Jul 2025 at 20:42, Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <
> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>>
>>> --
>>>
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>>> 99092 Erfurt
>>> Deutschland
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