Tense and Aspect: Preliminaries Laura Michaelis Linguistic 7430 Fall 2007 Questions 1. What is the difference between tense and aspect? 2. What is the relationship between tense and aspect? 3. What is the conceptual basis of aspect? 4. Is English an aspect language? 5. What is the relationship between grammatical aspect and verbal aspect? 6. What do aspectual markers do? 7. What is generic aspect? 1. What is the difference between tense and aspect? A. Tense as a deictic category. Hans Reichenbach (1949) proposes that tense is not fundamentally a relation between the time of speech and the time of an event or situation, but rather a relation between speech time (S) and reference time. Only in the case of relative tenses are event time (E) and reference time R split apart: Past Tense: E, R…S Past Perfect E…R…S B. Aspect vs. tense. Pancake/plate analogy (1) C’est la petite Cavinet! En remontant, tout à l’heure, je l’ai aperçue qui It’s (pres) the little Cavinet! In coming up (prp), a minute ago, I her have seen se faisait embrasser par le fils Martinez dans le garage à velos! herself made (imp) kiss (inf) by the son Martinez in the shed for bikes “It’s the Cavinet girl. While coming upstairs, just a minute ago, I saw her getting kissed (lit.‘who was making herself kissed’) by the Martinez boy in the bike shed.” (Binet, Les Bidochon 3, p. 10) 2. What is the relationship between tense and aspect? A. The imperfective-perfective distinction exists only in the past tense. B. In English, a reporting interpretation is not available for the simple present tense when the situation is an event: (2) #Look! Harry runs by the house! (3) #They build a new Walgreen’s on that corner. • The present is conceived of as a moment. • An event cannot be said to hold at a single moment alone. 3. What is the conceptual basis of aspect?2 A. The event-state distinction. • Imperfectively described situations (also known as states) obtain throughout the interval at issue, possibly overflowing the boundaries of that interval. • Perfectively described situations (i.e., events) are bounded insofar as they terminate within the relevant interval. To report the occurrence of an event is to report its cessation. B. Direction of inclusion (Partee 1984). Observation: states ‘leak’ out of the reference time for which they are asserted to hold; events are contained within their reference times: (4) Harry turned around. Marge was happy. (5) A water balloon hit the pavement near his feet. He was soaking wet. 4. Is English an aspect language? A. English appears to lack the event-state distinction. The attempt to transfer the category of ‘aspect’ from Slavonic to Germanic, and from there to Modern English grammar, strikes one as an instance of misdirected ingenuity. (Zandvoort 1962:19) English has no morphological expression of the event-state distinction, unlike French and Latin, etc. The progressive cannot be used to translate the French imparfait: (6) Ils avaient des lacets, les préhistoriques? They had (imp) some shoelaces, the prehistorics? “They had shoelaces, prehistoric people?” “*They were having shoelaces, prehistoric people?” (Binet, Les Bidochon 2, p. 30) B. But the event-state distinction has grammatical consequences. The grammatical behaviors can be used as diagnostics for the event-state distinction (some of these are more reliable than others): • Test 1. If one can report the situation by means of the simple present tense, then it is a state. A state with a temporal bound specified is not a state: (7) #She lives in Boulder for three years. • Test 2. The when-clause test (Vlach 1981): (8) When the phone rang, she was asleep. (9) When the phone rang, she got up. • Test 3. Extensibility. (10) She liked cats then and she still does. (11) #She adopted a cat then and she still does.3 • Test 4. Spatial and temporal location. (12) Where did you see her? (19) #Where did you like cats? (20) At what point did you leave? (21) ?At what point did you like cats? • Test 5. Iteration. (22) He spoke up four times. (23) ?He preferred red wine four times. 5. How do grammatical aspect and lexical aspect interact? A. Aspect first comes to the attention of English-speaking linguists through a set of distinctions referred to as AKTIONSARTEN. Aktionsart is typically defined as ‘inherent lexical aspect’. Episodic Static State change No state changeEffected Manifested Accomplishments Achievements Activities StatesShe fixed the fence. She fell down. She skipped. She was sad. Situation Types Figure 1. The Aktionsart classes States Verbs of EXISTENCE (exist, live, remain); PROPERTY ATTRIBUTION/LOCATION (copula + XP), verbs of PERCEPTION (see, hear, feel); POSSESSION (own, possess), NEED (need, want); EMOTION (love, prefer); COGNITION (remember, understand); BELIEF (believe, know, doubt). Activities Verbs of DIRECTED MOTION (walk, follow, run); POSTURE (sit, stand, lie); MOTION (shiver, wiggle); LIGHT/SOUND EMISSION (shine, rumble); CONVERSATION (argue, speak, discuss, converse); USE (eat, read, use, enjoy); PATTERN EXECUTION (dance, exercise); DIRECTED PERCEPTION (monitor, watch); COGNITION (consider, ponder). Achievements MENTAL EVENTS (realize, forget); SEMELFACTIVE EVENTS (cough, tap, blink); SOCIO-PHYSICAL TRANSITIONS (die, collapse, win, lose); MANIFESTATIONS (appear, disappear); boundary crossings (enter, exit, arrive, depart); POSTURE CHANGES (sit down, stand up, lie down, wake up); ACTION ENGAGEMENT (start, stop, finish).4 Accomplishments Verbs of LOCATION CHANGE (go, bring, take); TRANSFER (teach, give, load, tell); REMOVAL (remove, steal, strip); CREATION (make, build, create, destroy); COVERAGE (do, memorize, learn, saturate, cover), CAUSATION OF RESULT ( fix, repair, smash). B. The array of participant roles will influence whether a situation is an event or a state. (24) I *seesaw a flash. (25) I seesaw the Flatirons. (26) I *rememberremembered to put the cat out. (27) I rememberremembered the time we all went to Vail.