Aspect

fAAktion

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Lemma

aspect

Definiens

Grammatical domain encoding the temporal constituency of the

position (English)

situation and its distribution in time.

German

Aspekt

equivalent Definiens position (German) Further

Aspect is the traditional term for a vast and rather heterogeneous

explanation

functional domain serving for the linguistic encoding of the

EA not more than 4000 characters, SA not more 20000 characters!

internal temporal structure of situations expressed by predicates and of the speaker’s assessment of this temporal structure and its relation to the reference time established in discourse (as distinct from tense, which, according to current neoReichenbachian approaches, establishes the relation between reference time and speech time, see KLEIN 1994). The broadest conception of aspect includes semantic distinctions ranging from lexically encoded situation types (such as states, activities, accomplishments and achievements of VENDLER 1967) to inflectional oppositions such as French Passé Composé vs. Imparfait or English Simple vs. Progressive tenses. Current typologically and theoretically oriented practice, starting from COMRIE 1976, MASLOV 1978 and DAHL 1985 and developed in such work as SMITH 1991[1997], BREU 1994, KLEIN 1994, BERTINETTO/DELFITTO 2000, assumes a principled distinction between situation types (actionality or Aktionsart, see TATEVOSOV 2002; the term “Aktionsart” is somewhat less preferable, since it is also applied to actional modifiers discussed below), involving such lexical/ontological distinctions as static vs. dynamic, durative vs. punctual and telic vs. atelic, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, grammatically encoded viewpoint aspect (such as perfective and imperfective), whose function is

ultimately to embed situations in discourse by relating them to reference/topic time (KLEIN 1994) and “zooming in” at their different phases (see DICKEY 2016 for a general survey). In between actionality proper and viewpoint operators it is necessary to distinguish a broad and heterogeneous domain of actional modifiers, i.e. operators shifting predicates from one situation type to another, e.g. stativizers, iteratives, telicizers etc. Aspect shows great and not yet fully explored cross-linguistic variation. Languages differ widely as to the array of available situation types (the fact not yet recognized by all specialists, but see TATEVOSOV 2002 for empirical arguments) and as to which aspectual functions they grammaticalize, how different functions are distributed over grammatical markers, and how they interact with situation types, with each other and with other grammatical domains, such as tense, mood or voice. As a result of still ongoing typological work started by DAHL 1985 and continued by BYBEE/DAHL 1989 and BYBEE/PERKINS/PAGLIUCA 1994, a number of cross-linguistic aspectual gram types (i.e. clusters of grams of different individual languages showing significant similarities in meanings and use) have been identified, but their inventory is yet far from being exhausted. Formal means of expressing aspectual meanings differ widely. Besides the most common affixal morphology, languages employ non-concatenative morphological processes such as reduplication, segmental and prosodic alternations and combinations thereof, as well as periphrastic expressions such as auxiliary verb constructions or invariable particles. Since all aspectual meanings are high on BYBEE’s (1985) relevance scale, it is no surprise that aspect is normally expressed closer to the verbal stem than tense and mood and that its expression is often not fully regular. Finally, aspectual distinctions can be manifested outside of the verbal domain sensu stricto, as e.g. in the Finnic languages, where with accomplishment transitive verbs the partitive case marking of the direct object induces imperfective viewpoint, while the genitive/nominative case marking signals perfectivity, with the verb itself not marking aspect, cf. example

(1). (1) Finnish (Finno-Ugric < Uralic; HUUMO 2010: 91) a. Sö-i-n puuro-a. eat-PST-1SG porridge-PTV.SG ‘I was eating (the) porridge.’ b. Sö-i-n puuro-n. eat-PST-1SG porridge-GEN.SG ‘I ate up the porridge.’ The best known and admittedly the most typologically common (cf. DAHL/VELUPILLAI 2013) aspectual opposition is that between the perfective and the imperfective viewpoints, roughly corresponding to the distinction between situations viewed “from outside” in their totality vs. viewed “from inside”. This well-known definition by COMRIE (1976: 16) has been formalized by Smith (1991[1997]: Ch. 4) and KLEIN (1994: 118) by recourse to the notion of reference time or topic time, which is included into the situation time with imperfective aspect and, by contrast, includes the situation time with perfective aspect. Despite these rather straightforward definitions, languages differ widely in the actual uses of perfective and imperfective grams, with differences partly due to their interaction with different situation types, and of course, there are languages without any systematic formal manifestation of viewpoints, e.g. German and Paraguayan Guaraní. Thus, the distribution of the English Simple (perfective) vs. Progressive (imperfective) tenses significantly overlaps with, but is not identical to, the distribution of the Russian Perfective resp. Imperfective verbs. With reference to completed resp. ongoing telic situations perfective resp. imperfective are used in both languages, cf. (2a,b) and (3a,b), while temporally bounded atelic situations are expressed by the perfective in English (2c) and by the imperfective in Russian (3c). This indicates that the aspectual systems can be differentially sensitive to the notions of completion (ultimately linked to actionality) vs. temporal boundedness. (2) English (Germanic < Indo-European; own knowledge) a. John wrote the letter. (telic, completed - perfective)

b. John was writing the letter. (telic, ongoing - imperfective) c. Yesterday John wrote letters. (atelic, bounded - perfective) (3) Russian (Slavic < Indo-European, own knowledge, translations as in (2)) a. Ivan napisal pis’mo. (telic, completed - perfective) b. Ivan pisal pis’mo. (telic, ongoing - imperfective) c. Včera Ivan pisal pis’ma. (atelic, bounded - imperfective) In a mirror-image way, the English imperfective Progressive is famously incompatible with stative verbs (*I am knowing John), while the Russian Imperfective freely combines with them, which reflects the distinction between the cross-linguistic gram types progressive (requires dynamic predicates) and “broad” imperfective (combines with all situation types). Both English and Russian show viewpoint distinctions in principle independent of other verbal categories such as tense. In many languages aspectual viewpoints are encoded as part of the tense system, the most common distinction being that between the perfective and the imperfective past tenses with no aspectual opposition elsewhere, as e.g. in French or Kabardian, cf. (4). (4) Kabardian, Besleney dialect (= East Circassian, Northwest Caucasian, Russia; examples from own fieldwork texts) a. šxe žʼ-jə-ʔ-wəre pječʼjen'je-xe-r jewe jə-šx-t. eat(IMP) say-3SG.A-say-CVB cookie-PL-ABS PTCL 3SG.A-eatPST.IPF

‘When she told him “Eat!”, he was (already) eating cookies.’ b. jəṭane jewe kaše jə-šx-a. then PTCL porridge 3SG.A-eat-PST.PFV ‘Then he ate the porridge.’ c. kaše s-xʷe-p-ṣ̂ə-ne. porridge 1SG.IO-BEN-2SG.A-do-FUT ‘You will cook / will be cooking porridge for me.’ Besides the perfective and the imperfective and their variants such as completive or progressive (see respective chapters for more details), there are at least two further cross-linguistic gram types related to viewpoint aspect and explicitly identified as such by KLEIN (1994: Ch. 4), i.e. the resultative and the prospective.

Resultative is a well-established cross-linguistic gram type (see NEDJALKOV ed. 1988) focusing on the resultant state of a telic situation (as in The window is closed) and is restricted in its combination with situation types. Resultative is related to the broader domain of the perfect grams; the latter, according to KLEIN 1994 and NISHIYAMA/KOENIG 2010, focuses on the rather vaguely defined “post-state” pragmatically related to a situation (cf. the commonly invoked notion of “current relevance”) and thus combines with any situation type, including statives (as in I have

been to London). Resultatives frequently evolve into perfects and then into perfective past tenses (BYBEE/PERKINS/PAGLIUCA 1994: Ch. 3). By contrast, the prospective focuses on the preparatory stage (pre-time) of the situation thus giving rise to future tenses (KLEIN 1994: 116-117), though by itself it is compatible with any time reference, as in Neo-Aramaic in (5) and the English translations. (5) Neo-Aramaic (COGHILL 2010: 369) a. zi-lə ’āθə məṭrɒ. PRSP-3SG.M

come.3SG.M rain

‘It is going to rain.’ b. zi-lə ’āθe-wɒ lá-wəllebə. PRSP-3SG.M

come.3SG.M-PST NEG-he.was.able

‘He was going to come but he was not able to.’ There are two further more “exotic” cross-linguistic gram types of viewpoint aspect which show particularly strong interaction with situation types. One of them, especially well represented in South and East Asia and without a commonly accepted name, somewhat paradoxically combines the resultative and the progressive functions distributed according to situation type, see EBERT (1995). Thus, in Japanese the periphrastic construction in -te/-de iru has resultative interpretation with punctual verbs (6a), progressive interpretation with atelic verbs (6b), and is ambiguous between both readings with telic accomplishment verbs (6c) (cf. OGIHARA 1998). (6) Japanese (EBERT 1995: 192) a. Kare wa sin-de i-ru.

he TOP die-CVB AUX-PRS ‘He has died/is dead.’ b. Kare wa ason-de i-ru. he TOP play-CVB AUX-PRS ‘He is playing.’ c. Kare wa hon o yon-de i-ru. he TOP book ACC read-CVB AUX-PRS ‘He is reading / has read the book.’ Another type of viewpoint aspectual gram, attested in many Niger-Congo languages as well as in, e.g., Inuktitut and a number of creoles, is the so-called default aspect (BOHNEMEYER/SWIFT 2004) or factative (the term introduced by WELMERS 1973: 311 and widely used in the Africanist tradition), i.e. a default assignment of perfective resp. imperfective viewpoint to predicates of certain actional types. Thus, in Jalonke unmarked stative verbs are imperfective (7a) while unmarked dynamic verbs are perfective (7b) and require overt markers for imperfective viewpoint (7c). (7) Jalonke (Mande, West Africa) a. Taanu jafun. ‘Taanu is mad.’ (LÜPKE 2005: 162) b. Adama tugan. ‘Adama jumped.’ (LÜPKE 2005: 148) c. Adama tugan-ma (jump-IPF) ‘Adama is jumping.’ (LÜPKE 2005: 149) It should be noted that the factative is not always formally unmarked; thus, in Igbo it is expressed by a suffix (WELMERS 1973: 347, 379). The domain of actional modifiers (sometimes referred to as Aktionsarten) is quite broad and has not yet been explored in full detail in typology, primarily because of the tendency towards their derivational (i.e. lexically restricted and semantically not fully compositional) expression and language-particular idiosyncrasies. Two primary subdomains interfacing with other aspectual categories can be singled out. The first one is known under such headings as “verbal plurality” or “pluractionality”, and

has received considerable attention in typology, starting with the classic work DRESSLER 1968 and continued by CUSIC 1981, XRAKOVSKIJ (ed.) 1997, and SHLUINSKY 2006. Here belong, on the one hand, such primarily derivational operators as semelfactives (‘V once’), iteratives and frequentatives (‘V many times’), distributives (‘V with different participants’), repetitives (‘V again’; on these, see STOYNOVA 2013) and, on the other hand, the primarily inflectional habitual, which denotes a stative situation of the type ‘V occurs regularly’. The habitual meaning is often a part of the polysemy of the general imperfective, as in Russian (8), or of the imperfective past, as in French or Kabardian (9), thus forming part of the expression of viewpoint aspect. (8) Russian a. Deti bol’še ne čitajut knigi. ‘Children no longer read (IPF,PRS) books.’ b. Ran’še deti čitali knigi. ‘In earlier times, children used to read (IPF,PST) books.’ (9) Kabardian, Besleney dialect (= East Circassian, Northwest Caucasian, Russia; textual example)

ǯ’apxʷed-wə χʷerəbze-č̣’e jəpe-m ze-de-gʷəš’əʔe-xe-t thus-ADV sign-INS before-OBL REC-COM-talk-PL-PST.IPF ‘Thus they used to communicate in signs’ Specialized habituals are also attested, like in Nenets in (10); they tend to be restricted to the past time reference (DAHL 1985: 100-102), as the English used to construction or the Lithuanian suffix -dav in (11). Such kind of habitual grams are in principle independent of and compatible with grams expressing viewpoint aspect (thus, the Lithuanian Habitual Past can attach to both perfective and imperfective verbs). (10) Tundra Nenets (Samoyedic < Uralic, Russia; NIKOLAEVA 2014: 84)

voskresen’ja-x˚qna m’a-k˚nanaq me-s’˚ti-waq. Sunday-LOC.PL tent-LOC.1PL be-HAB-1PL ‘We are usually at home on Sundays.’ (11) Lithuanian (Baltic < Indo-European; textual example)

Šeimininkas skaity-dav-o (read-HAB-PST.3) savo poeziją, skambin-dav-o (play-HAB-PST.3) namų darbo fortepijonu. ‘The host used to read his poetry or play the piano of his construction.’ The other cross-linguistically well-attested type of actional modifier is constituted by “bounders” or “telicizers” turning predicates into those denoting temporally bounded events of various sorts. Such operators are best known from Slavic languages, where prefixes originally denoting spatial orientation with verbs of displacement have developed into actional modifiers and ultimately into derivational markers of perfective aspect. However, such affixes are attested in numerous other languages, not only those related or areally close to Slavic (such as Lithuanian, Hungarian, Georgian or Ossetic, see ARKADIEV 2014), but also elsewhere, e.g. in Qiangic (Sino-Tibetan), Quechuan, Chadic, or some Oceanic languages. To this category also belong English and Scandinavian verbal particles, Chinese “coverbs” and aspectual auxiliaries or light verbs of many languages of Eurasia, cf. (12). (12) Urdu (Indo-Aryan < Indo-European, Pakistan; BUTT 1995: 109-110) a. us=ne gaanaa gaa-yaa. he.OBL=ERG song sing-PFV.SG.M ‘He sang a song.’ (neutral perfective) b. us=ne gaanaa gaa ḍaal-aa. he.OBL=ERG song sing put-PFV.SG.M ‘He sang a song (completely, forcefully).’ (emphatic completive) c. vo gaanaa gaa paṛ-aa. he.NOM song sing fall-PFV.SG.M ‘He burst out into a song.’ (inchoative) Telicizers may denote the completion (completive, as in eat up) or the beginning (inchoative, inceptive and ingressive) of the event or merely its temporal boundedness (delimitative) without completion, as exemplified by the Russian prefixed verbs in (13). (13) Russian (own knowledge)

ona pela ‘she sang’ (imperfective, atelic)

ona s-pela pesnju ‘she sang a song’ (perfective: completive) ona za-pela ‘she started singing’ (perfective: ingressive) ona po-pela ‘she sang for some time’ (perfective: delimitative) In addition to the aspectual meaning, telicizers often alter the verb’s semantics in a more or less idiosyncratic way, cf. the perfective derivatives of the Georgian verb c’er ‘describe; write’ in (14). (14) Georgian (Kartvelian; TSCHENKELI 1960-1974: 2137-2138)

a-mo-c’er ‘write out’ da-mo-c’er ‘prescribe’ gada-c’er ‘rewrite’ da-c’er ‘write up’ še-mo-c’er ‘write around smth.’ ča-c’er ‘record’ Actional modifiers are in principle independent of viewpoint operators and hence are compatible with them. Thus, Bulgarian (LINDSTEDT 1985) has an inflectional opposition between the perfective (Aorist) and imperfective (Imperfect) past tenses cross-cutting the derivational aspect distinction expressed primarily by prefixes, cf. (15). (15) Bulgarian (Slavic < Indo-European) a. vseki păt, kogato iz-leze-xme (out-get-IMPF.1PL) na poljana... (Perfective + Imperfect – habitual completed situation; LINDSTEDT 1985: 189) ‘every time when we came out (of the forest) on a meadow...’ b. A kolko pja (sing:AOR.3SG) djado Galuško ..., nikoj ne znaeše. (Imperfective + Aorist – temporally bounded atelic situation; LINDSTEDT 1985: 176) ‘And how long Old Galuško sang ..., nobody knew.’ c. Tja iz-pja (out-sing:AOR.3SG) pesenta za tri minuti. (Perfective + Aorist – completive; LINDSTEDT 1985: 170) ‘She sang the song in three minutes.’ d. Kompozitorăt piše-še (write-IMPF.3SG) nova simfonija. (Imperfective + Imperfect – progressive; LINDSTEDT 1985: 163) ‘The composer was writing a new symphony.’ In languages where aspectual meanings are expressed by

inflectional means verbs are inherently specified for actionality (situation type), but not for aspectual viewpoint. There are, however, languages where verbs appear to have lexically specified viewpoint. Thus, in Slavic, Baltic, Georgian or Mokilese, morphologically underived verbs are predominantly imperfective (though simplex perfectives are found as well), while in Nenets or Mapudungun most or all simplex verbs are perfective. Actional modifiers in such languages are able to change not only the situation type but also the viewpoint, e.g. telicizers perfectivize imperfective verbs while iteratives imperfectivize perfective verbs. In some languages, e.g. in Slavic, application of actional modifiers (and, concomitantly, viewpoint operators) can be recursive, cf. the Russian example (16). (16) Russian (Slavic < Indo-European, own knowledge) a. pisa-t’ ‘write:INF’ (imperfective) b. pod-[pisat’] ‘sign:INF (lit. under-write)’ (perfective) c. [pod-pis]-yva-t’ ‘sign:INF’ (secondary imperfective) d. na-[pod-pis-yva]-t’ ‘sign.a.lot:INF’ (secondary perfective) Besides an evident semantic impact (reflected in that sentences differing only in viewpoint aspect sometimes have different truthconditions, e.g. English John was crossing the street vs. John

crossed the street; see DOWTY 1979 and much subsequent literature on the formal semantic modeling of aspect), aspectual categories have important functions in discourse (cf. e.g. HOPPER 1979; FLEISCHMAN 1985; SMITH 2003: Ch. 4,5). It is commonly assumed that in narratives, the perfective aspect marks successive events of the main line (foreground), while imperfective and resultative are used for background situations usually simultaneous with the events of the main line. However, languages show considerable and not yet fully investigated variation in this domain, too. Thus, in Tzotzil (Mayan), the alternations of the perfective and imperfective aspects signal episode boundaries, so that the imperfective can be used both for background and foreground events (VINOGRADOV 2014).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I thank Dmitry Gerasimov, Andrey Shluinsky and Igor Vinogradov for very useful comments on the first draft of this article. Place for you notes, links, synonyms, antonyms, references etc. synonym(s): antonym(s): link(s): abbreviations: 1 — 1st person; 2 — 2nd person; 3 — 3rd person; A — agent; ABS — absolutive; ACC — accusative; ADV — adverb; AOR — aorist (= perfective past); AUX

— auxiliary verb; BEN — benefactive; COM — comitative; CVB — converb; ERG —

ergative; FUT — future; GEN — genitive; HAB — habitual; IMP — imperative; IMPF — imperfect (= imperfective past); INF — infinitive; INS — instrumental; IO — indirect object; IPF — imperfective; LOC — locative; M — masculine; NEG — negation; NOM — nominative; OBL — oblique; PFV — perfective; PL — plural; PRS — present; PRSP — prospective; PST — past; PTCL — particle; PTV — partitive; REC — reciprocal; SG — singular; TOP — topic. references: ARKADIEV, P.M. 2014. Towards an areal typology of prefixal perfectivization.

Scando-Slavica 60(2), 384–405. BERTINETTO, P.-M./DELFITTO, D. 2000. Aspect vs. actionality: Why they should be kept apart. In: DAHL, Ö. (ed.) 2000. Tense and Aspect in the Languages of

Europe. Berlin, New York. 189–226. BOHNEMEYER, J. / SWIFT, M. 2004. Event realization and default aspect.

Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3), 263–296.

BREU, W. 1994. Interactions between lexical, temporal, and aspectual meanings.

Studies in Language 18(1), 23–44. BUTT, M. 1995. The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu. Stanford. BYBEE, J. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia. BYBEE, J./ DAHL, Ö. 1989. The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages of the world. Studies in Language 13(1), 51–103. BYBEE, J./ PERKINS, R.D./ PAGLIUCA, W. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar.

Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago, London. COGHILL, E. The grammaticalization of prospective aspect in a group of NeoAramaic dialects. Diachronica 27(3), 359–410. COMRIE, B. 1976. Aspect. A Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge. CUSIC, D.D. 1981. Verbal Plurality and Aspect. Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. DAHL, Ö. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford. DAHL, Ö./ VELUPILLAI, V. Perfective/imperfective aspect. In: DRYER, M./ HASPELMATH, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. wals.info/feature/65A. DICKEY, S.M. 2016. Lexical and grammatical aspect. In: RIEMER, N. (ed.), The

Routledge Handbook of Semantics. London, New York. 338–353. DOWTY, D.R. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht. DRESSLER, W.U. 1968. Studien zur verbalen Pluralität. Iterativum, Distributivum,

Durativum, Intensivum in der allgemeinen Grammatik, im Lateinischen und Hethitischen. Wien. EBERT, K.H. 1995. Ambiguous perfect-progressive forms across languages. In: BERTINETTO, P.M./ BIANCHI, V./ HIGGINBOTHAM, J./ DAHL, Ö./ SQUARTINI, M. (eds.). Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality, Vol. 2. Torino. 185–204. FLEISCHMAN, S. 1985. Discourse functions of tense-aspect oppositions in narrative. Linguistics 23. 851–882. HOPPER, P.J. 1979. Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In: GIVÓN, T. (ed.),

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LÜPKE, F. 2005. A Grammar of Jalonke Argument Structure. Utrecht. MASLOV, JU.S. 1978. K osnovanijam sopostavitel’noj aspektologii [Prolegomena to comparative aspectology]. In: MASLOV, JU.S (ed.), Voprosy sopostavitelʹnoj

aspektologii [Problems of comparative aspectology]. Leningrad., 4–44. NEDJALKOV, V.P. (ed.) 1988. Typology of Resultative Constructions. Amsterdam, Philadelphia. NIKOLAEVA, I. 2014. Tundra Nenets. Berlin, Boston. NISHIYAMA, A./ KOENIG, J.-P. 2010. What is a perfect state? Language 86(3), 611–646. OGIHARA, T. 1998. The ambiguity of the -te iru form in Japanese. Journal of East

Asian Linguistics 7. 87–120. SHLUINSKY, A. 2006. K tipologii predikatnoj množestvennosti: organizacija semantičeskoj zony [Towards a typology of verbal plurality: The structure of the semantic space]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 1: 46–75. SMITH, C. 1991[1997]. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht (2nd ed. 1997). SMITH, C. 2003. Modes of Discourse. The Local Structure of Texts. Cambridge. STOYNOVA, N.M. 2013. Pokazateli refaktiva [Repetitive markers]. Moscow. TATEVOSOV, S.T. 2002. The parameter of actionality. Linguistic Typology 6(3), 317–401. TSCHENKELI, K. 1960-1974. Georgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bearb. von Yolanda Marchev. Fasz. 1–26. Zürich. VENDLER, Z. 1967. Verbs and times. In: VENDLER, Z. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, New York. 97–121. VINOGRADOV, I. 2014. Aspect switching in Tzotzil (Mayan) narratives. Oklahoma

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