[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect
Juergen Bohnemeyer
jb77 at buffalo.edu
Tue Jul 29 15:17:58 UTC 2025
Dear Artem and Randy – I’d like to point out that the common characterization of Mandarin as tenseless may depend on the assumption, which happens to be widespread in Generative circles as it was apparently endorsed by Chomsky long ago, that there is no such thing as a true future tense, as futures are really modal or mood operators.
I happen to consider future tenses real, and to me it looks like Taiwanese Mandarin may have grammaticalized a future vs. non-future tense contrast.
Consider the following examples (courtesy of Yen-Ting Lin, who should not be held accountable for my analysis 😉). (1) serves as a diagnostic context for future time reference in Dahl (1985). The marker _huì_ is not omissible in this context. The anomalous continuation in (2) shows that the sentence in (1) conveys epistemic certainty. However, my sense is that this is not expressed by _huì_, but is a conversational implicature. Consider (3), which shows that the _huì_ clause can be embedded under a predicate of doubt.
(1) [QUESTION: What your brother DO if you don't go to see him today, do you think? ANSWER:]
Tā (*/huì) (gěi wŏ) xiĕ(*-le) xìn
He FUT to I write-PRV letter
‘He will write a letter (to me).’
(2) #… dàn wŏ bú quèdìng
but I not certain
‘… but I’m not certain (that he will).’
(3) Wŏ huáiyí tā (*/huì) xiĕ xìn.
I doubt he FUT write letter
‘I doubt that he’ll write a letter.’
Best – Juergen
Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of randylapolla via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Tuesday, July 29, 2025 at 01:23
To: Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com>
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect
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%20Tue,%20Jul%2029,%202025%20at%204:13%20AM,%20Sergey%20Loesov%20via%20Lingtyp%20%3c%3ca%20href=>> 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
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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