[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

Tue Jul 29 19:27:59 UTC 2025

Dear Tom and all,
see also Dahl 2001 for a discussion of *oh* in Maybrat, with similar conclusions as David’s.

Östen

Dahl, Östen. 2001. Languages without tense and aspect. In Aktionsart and Aspectotemporality in Non-European Languages, ed. by Karen H. Ebert and Fernando Zúñiga, 159-172. Zürich: Universität Zürich, Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

29 juli 2025 kl. 21:10 skrev David Gil via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>:

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<mailto: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<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2025 4:26 PM
To: Tom Koss <Tom.Koss at uantwerpen.be<mailto:Tom.Koss at uantwerpen.be>>
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Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

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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

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Tom Koss via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Date: Tuesday, July 29, 2025 at 09:44
To:
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Christoph Holz via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
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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

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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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