[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

Tue Jul 29 13:43:47 UTC 2025

Dear Sergey, dear all,

I would say that what Jürgen has stated for aspectual reference (meaning) and aspect (form) most probably also goes for temporal reference and tense: any utterance in any language will involve reference to a certain time span the speaker wishes to convey, but not all languages have tense as a grammatical category (and additionally, the number of distinctions within that category may vary from language to language, as is also the case for aspect).

In a study on 180 languages I conducted rather recently, I found all four logical possibilities in terms of the (non-) presence of tense and aspect as grammatical categories: A. languages that have both tense and aspect, B. languages that only have tense, C. languages that only have aspect, and D. languages that have neither tense nor aspect.

The frequency distribution looks as follows: A > B/C > D
So, cross-linguistically, it seems that languages like Chinese and Yucatec Maya are as common as languages like German (more or less).

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Tom Koss
University of Antwerp
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Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

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Dear Sergey,

Two other languages without tense are Konomala and Siar, two Oceanic languages of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. The languages only distinguish realis vs. irrealis and have a couple of aspect markers. Tense is inferred pragmatically. The same might have been true for Proto Oceanic.

Best wishes

Christoph

On Tue, 29 Jul 2025 at 07:23, randylapolla via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>> wrote:
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+%3C%3Ca+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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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

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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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Christoph Holz
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