[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

[Adam James Ross Tallman]

Hi Sergey,

Me and Andres Salanova worked on this problem a little, so *maybe* our
project relates to your question.

We wondered whether there was a continuum (or in whether it is useful to
posit a continuum) between perfective and imperfective somehow, but
couldn't make much sense of this idea in the end.

One way of approaching it, which we chose in the end, is by just deciding
that perfective = narrative time advancement, and imperfective = no
narrative time advancement, operationalizing this distinction so it can be
coded in naturalistic speech and seeing with which morphemes it correlates.
The degree to which a morpheme or construction correlates that distinction
is the degree to which it is perfective or imperfective.

Fairly descriptive, but we thought it might be a starting point for
investigating typological variation. A proceedings paper is available here.
<http://www.ddl.cnrs.fr/fulltext/DDL/Salanova_2022.pdf> (if the link
doesn't work let me know)

I thought that it would correlate a lot with lexical aspects, e.g. you just
tend to get imperfective readings more in contexts where you have stative
verbs. But we didn't have enough data to assess this I think. It turns out
in Chácobo the past tense marker is the most consistently correlated with
narrative time advancement and in Araona its whether you use a verbal or
nonverbal predicate construction (nonverbal predicate constructions are
associated with narrative time non-advancement naturally). Something
similar was found for Mebengokre.

But, I'd be very interested to hear if anyone was able to somehow measure
(im)perfectivity using a different conceptual-measurement framework. I
think this work remained pretty preliminary.

best,

A.




On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 5:20 PM Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Adam J.R. Tallman
Post-doctoral Researcher
Friedrich Schiller Universität
Department of English Studies
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