Aspect and Aktionsart
Our discussion of English in the previous section has a glaring omission: we haven’t yet discussed the progressive forms, i.e. forms like I am eating, I was eating, I have been eating, I will be eating and so on. These forms have a fundamental difference from tenses: they’re not, like tenses, about the event in time, i.e. about whether the event is located in the past, present or future; instead, they’re about whether time is seen as moving through the event: they’re about time in the event.
What do I mean by this? Think about the contrasts in (37).
John laughed is in the simple past or preterite tense: it tells us that at some point before the time of utterance, John was expressing his amusement. How does that contrast with (37b), John was laughing? With respect to the event’s location in time, it doesn’t contrast at all: just like (37a), (37b) tells us that the laugh occurred sometime before the moment of speaking. From the point of view of how they locate the event in time, (37a) and (37b) are identical.
So how do they differ? Think about the different ways each presents what John was doing. John was laughing seems to emphasise the progress or unfolding of the event over a period of time (several seconds, presumably): John laughed, on the other hand, seems to treat the event as a single moment in time, and not to focus any attention on the existence of different stages within the laughing event itself. Another way of putting this contrast would be to say that John was laughing ‘zooms in’ on the event so that we become aware of its internal temporal duration; John laughed, on the other hand, ‘zooms out’ to a distance at which the event just appears as a single, undifferentiated whole.
The difference between (37a) and (37b) is a difference of aspect. Aspect is the name of the grammatical category which expresses differences in the way time is presented in events. Different tenses show different locations of the event in time; different aspects show different ways of presenting time within the event itself: as flowing, or as stationary. The aspectual system, then, is about how the internal temporal constituency of an event is viewed; about whether the event is viewed from the distance, as a single unanalysable whole, with its beginning, middle and end foreshortened into one, or from close-up, so that the distinct stages of the event can be seen individually.
The principal aspectual distinction is between perfective and imperfective aspect. Perfective aspect is the one found in (37a); imperfective in (37b). In English, perfective aspect is expressed by the ‘simple’ forms of the verb, and imperfective by the ‘progressive’ or ‘continuous’ ones – those that are formed by the BE + -ing construction. (The English term ‘progressive’ or ‘continuous’, which we used above to describe forms like (37b), are language particular labels for imperfective aspect: in what follows, we will mainly use them as labels for the formal grammatical category marked by BE + -ing. To mark the semantic values that these categories express, we will use the terms perfective and imperfective.) We find the same perfective/ imperfective contrast in the following forms:
Note that the distinction has nothing to do with the actual nature of the event: exactly the same event can be expressed using imperfective or perfective aspect, without this entailing any difference in what actually happened. The same event of reading the paper, doing the crossword or practising is described in the two columns above. The shift between perfective and imperfective aspect reflects no difference in the event itself, but simply a difference in the way the speaker chooses to present (or ‘construe’) the event. It’s especially important to realize that the contrast between perfective and imperfective is independent of the actual duration of the event in question. Events that lasted a long time can often be described in perfective aspect, as in (38a), whereas instantaneous (‘punctual’) events may also be presented imperfectively, although this is somewhat rarer (38b):
Similarly, the choice between perfective and imperfective aspect is also independent of the question of whether the event is completed:
Sentence (39a) uses perfective aspect (climbed) but signifies an incomplete action; (39b) uses imperfective (were climbing) but refers to an event which was completed.
The aspectual contrast between perfective and imperfective therefore can’t be reduced either to a contrast of duration or of completion. The default correlation is for verbs in the perfective to refer to complete actions, and for verbs in the imperfective to refer to ones with a temporal duration, but the above examples show that these default specifications can easily be overridden. Aspect refers to a quite distinct semantic cate gory from completion or duration, and languages have different morpho- syntactic means of conveying these notions. In Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia), for example, duration of an event can be registered through reduplication of the verb stem.
Aspectual contrasts play an important role in discourse, especially in narrative. The choice of an imperfective or perfective form influences the interpretation of the chronological relations between the different actions reported in a text. For example, consider the short narrative in (40):
These verbs are all perfective. This indicates a sequence of events. We can only understand the different actions as following each other: first Kewell runs, then he passes, then Cahill scores. Varying the order of the verbs also varies the temporal order in which we understand the events occurred:
By contrast, a string of imperfective verbs denotes a set of simultaneous actions:
Lastly, the combination in (43) shows a foregrounded perfective event cutting into a background imperfective event:
This time, we can vary the order of the verbs without any change to the temporal relations: whatever the order of the clauses, the default interpretation is that Cahill scored during the period in which Kewell was running and Kennedy fixing his boot. For more discussion of the role of aspect in discourse, see Hopper (1982) and Thelin (1990).
A major difference between tense and aspect is that tense is deictic (3.2.3) and aspect isn’t. The time of utterance forms the point of reference which structures a language’s tense system; since the time of utterance changes from one utterance to the next, the actual values of past, present and future themselves change, future becoming present becoming past as time moves on. The particular time reference of any tense therefore has to be anchored deictically in the moment of utterance, just as the reference of spatial deictics like here and there has to be anchored by considerations of the speaker’s location. Aspect, by contrast, doesn’t depend like tense on any external, deictic connection to the speech situation; it only makes reference to the internal temporal properties of the event, regardless of its location with respect to the continually shifting present moment. But despite this important difference, aspect and tense categories are typically merged in the grammatical categories of a particular language. Two well- known examples are the Spanish ‘imperfect’ tense, which combines imperfective aspect and past time, and the ‘perfective’ in Arabic (perfective aspect and past time).
QUESTION Aspectual considerations give us a way to explain the impossibility of using the English simple present (I read, I run, I fly) to refer to presently occurring events. Can you see what the explanation is?
