[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[randylapolla]

Hi Sergey,
Not just Chinese (i.e. Mandarin), but most of Sinitic and Sino-Tibetan “encodes only aspectual meanings, with tense always inferred pragmatically as an implicature .”
The controversies come up when made up sentences rather than natural data in context are used, and so it is easy to “show” tense distinctions that are actually just the pragmatic implicatures you mentioned.
Cross-linguistically there is also poor understanding of the difference between tense and aspect, and so, for example, English “going to/gonna” is talked about as tense.

Randy

On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 4:13 AM, Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <[lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org](mailto:On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 4:13 AM, Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <<a href=)> wrote:

> 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
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Lingtyp mailing list
>>>>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>>>>
>>>>> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>>
>>>> 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
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Lingtyp mailing list
>>>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>>> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Lingtyp mailing list
>>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250729/10c580ad/attachment.htm>