[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

Tue Jul 29 19:03:45 UTC 2025

Dear Tom, all,

Regarding Maybrat, Dol (1999:176,178) provides examples of what she calls
an adverbial marker *oh*, which seem to have the function of a iamitive
aspectual marker.  (The term *iamitive *had not yet been introduced when
the grammar was written.)

Similar iamitive constructions, mostly periphrastic, are common throughout
the Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area, encompassing mainland Southeast Asia,
the Indonesian archipelago, and parts of western New Guinea (Gil
2015:362-4).  More generally, although many of the languages of that area
tend to be isolating, they typically have a small number of free forms
denoting time and/or state/event structure, which are often weakly
grammaticalized and may thus, under some definitions, qualify as (perhaps
non-prototypical) markers of tense or aspect.  But clearly, both tense and
aspect play a substantially lesser role in these languages than in many
languages from other parts of the world.

Dol, Philomena (1999) *A Grammar of Maybrat, A Language of the Bird's Head,
Irian Jaya, Indonesia*, PhD Dissertation, Leiden University.

Gil, David (2015) "The Mekong-Mamberamo Linguistic Area", in N.J. Enfield
and B. Comrie eds., *Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, The State of the
Art*, Pacific Linguistics, DeGruyter Mouton, Berlin, 266-355.

David

On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 8:49 PM Tom Koss via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Dear Jürgen,
>
> great to hear that you're interested! Unfortunately, I haven't published
> an article on this yet. But parts of the results of the study can be found
> in Chapter III and the appendix of my thesis. This is the link:
>
> https://www.lotpublications.nl/the-present-perfective-paradox
>
> I should mention, however, that my work hasn't really focused on the
> relation between tense and aspect as grammatical categories so far. Due to
> this, and to the size of the sample, I could only take a rather
> coarse-grained look at the aspectual system of each language, mostly
> focusing on the perfective/imperfective distinction.
>
> As for your search for a "radically aspect-less" language: I remember
> Maybrat (isolate, Southwest Papua/Indonesia) as a language with hardly any
> verbal morphology which I coded as possessing neither tense nor aspect. So,
> this might be a potential candidate.
>
> Best,
> Tom
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 29, 2025 4:26 PM
> *To:* Tom Koss <Tom.Koss at uantwerpen.be>
> *Cc:* LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective
> aspect
>
>
> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not
> click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know
> the content is safe.
>
> Dear Tom – Have you published that study yet? I’d be super-interested in
> the details.
>
>
>
> My own observations align with your findings, with one qualification: If
> we allow **degrees** of aspect-lessness/tense-lessness to enter into
> consideration, my hunch is that we will find fewer languages that are *
> *completely** without any (however optional) morphosyntactic constraints
> on viewpoint aspect interpretation than languages that are without any
> morphosyntactic constraints on tense interpretation (i.e., on
> interpretating the relation between reference/topic time and utterance
> time).
>
>
>
> I have not actually seen a language that would be entirely free of
> morphosyntactic constraints on viewpoint aspectual interpretation. Even
> Finnish and German, the languages commonly cited as lacking grammaticalized
> viewpoint aspect markers, have a perfect form (which in German is most
> commonly used to express past reference, but retains polysemy as a
> post-state/time marker). Colloquial German in addition has a weakly
> grammaticalized progressive construction for atelic VPs.
>
>
>
> I’d be very interested in examples of “radically aspect-less” languages if
> they exist!
>
>
>
> Best – Juergen
>
>
>
>
>
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585
> 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
> --
>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
> Tom Koss via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Date: *Tuesday, July 29, 2025 at 09:44
> *To: *
> *Cc: *LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >
> *Subject: *Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective
> aspect
>
> 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
> ------------------------------
>
> *From:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
> Christoph Holz via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 29, 2025 9:59 AM
> *To:* randylapolla <randylapolla at protonmail.com>
> *Cc:* LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective
> aspect
>
>
>
> *CAUTION:* This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not
> click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know
> the content is safe.
>
>
>
> 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> 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
> <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>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> *Christoph Holz*
>
> Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Naples L'Orientale
>
> Adjunct Research Fellow, Jawun Research Centre, CQU
>
>
>
> Website: https://tianglanguage.wordpress.com/
>
> Orcid: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-7997-4928
>
>
>
> Recent publications:
>
> A comprehensive grammar of Tiang
> <https://acquire.cqu.edu.au/articles/thesis/A_comprehensive_grammar_of_Tiang/25182350?file=44461052>
>
> Documentation of Konomala <https://www.elararchive.org/dk0759>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>

-- 

David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email: dapiiiiit at gmail.com
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250729/1cf8dc0b/attachment-0001.htm>