Is it of much use?
Goloviznin Konstantin
kottcoos at mail.ru
Thu Mar 8 19:09:27 UTC 2012
08 марта 2012, 21:44 от Emily Saunders <emilka at MAC.COM>:
> In discussing Russian aspect with some students the other night and
> the verb "to read" in particular, it came up that the presence of
> other words in the sentence (inclusion of the object, time adjectives,
> etc.) affects the aspectual meaning of the English verb to a large
> extent.
>
> For instance
> He read - is a statement that the action occurred - он читал
> He read the book - is necessarily perfective - it implies he finished
> the book - Он прочитал книгу.
>
> BUT
>
> He read HIS book last night.... -- isn't quite so clear cut as to
> whether the book was finished and most likely it wasn't.
>
> The proposed system could be a useful aid for those studying English
> -- and in classifying present perfect as a form of the present tense
> -- for Russian learners in particular. But I don't think that the
> English verb tense system by itself can match the Russian aspectual
> one without a lot of qualifiers.
>
> My rough two cents,
>
> Emily Saunders
>
> On 08.03.2012, at 7:33, anne marie devlin wrote:
>
...try to make this discussion wider.
Telling the truth I've been thinking for long on making universal
description-algorithm on studying any language. Got the following
about this.
Firstly, any language we compress to only a dot-like definition: any
language is a description of ... Then this definition inflate into the first layer. This layer is under
mathematics-like rules: 2+2 = 4 or very close to 4. This layer is more
theoretical (but more practical than any standart grammar). Around this layer we shape the second one
standing under: we have some strictful rules to ... trespass them.
Here 2+2 can be 4.5, 5.0 or even 5.5. This system can be called
"two-layered perl".
Then acording this idilogy we have:
In the first layer: He read - is a statement that the action occurred
- он прочитал (always in any context).
In the second layer: He read - is a statement that the action occurred
- can be он прочитал or он читал (according the context we have).
Adding needed qualifiers and modifyers we get all tints and colors.
The same can be done for - He read HIS book last night. This way we
may get rid of "russian salad" having come to something like "ordnung ist
ordnung" ;)
Konstantin.
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