[Lingtyp] once again about perfective vs. imperfective aspect

Thu Jul 31 13:41:27 UTC 2025

Dear Adam – Just adding a few references:

There is definitely a perfective-imperfective continuum as far as the likelihood of different lexical/situational-aspectual classes to occur with (im)perfective reference goes. This is explored in Becker & Malchukov (2022), which builds, among other things, upon observations in Bohnemeyer & Swift (2004).

The correlation between perfective aspect and foregrounding and non-perfective aspect and backgrounding was pointed out long ago by Hopper (1982) and by the early DRT literature. An account that dispenses with the stipulations of the DRT framework is developed in Bohnemeyer (2009).

Best – Juergen

Becker, L. & A. Malchukov. (2022). Semantic maps and typological hierarchies: Evidence for the Actionality Hierarchy. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41(1): 31-66. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2021-2044

Bohnemeyer, J. (2009). Temporal anaphora in a tenseless language. In W. Klein & P. Li (eds.), The expression of time in language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 83-128. Preprint<http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/MdG_ECC-Time_04_Bohnemeyer.pdf>.

Bohnemeyer, J. & M. Swift. (2004). Event realization and default aspect. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3): 263-296. Preprint<http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/LING482_02_final.pdf>. Errata<http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/defaultaspect-corrections.pdf>.

Hopper, P. J. (1982). Aspect between discourse and grammar: An introductory essay for the volume. In P. J. Hopper (ed.), Tense-aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics. Containings the contributions to a symposium on tense and aspect, held at UCLA, May 1979. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 3-18.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Adam James Ross Tallman via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Thursday, July 31, 2025 at 02:51
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,

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<mailto: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
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