320 The subjectivity of utterance

and modality, and therefore the distinction between tense and mood, is not always clear-cut in the description of particular languages and that this is especially so in the case of the so-called future tense. Mood and modality are dealt with in section 10.5. But before that, something must now be said about aspect, which, as we shall see, has not generally been distinguished from tense, until recently, in the grammatical analysis of many languages, including English.

10.4 THE GRAMMATICAL C AT EG O RY O F A S P EC T

The term 'aspect', unlike 'tense', is not one that is widely used by non-specialists. By comparison, not only with 'tense', but also with 'mood' and many terms employed by grammarians, it is of comparatively recent (i.e., nineteenth-century) origin. It is only very recently indeed that it has been used in relation to languages other than Russian and other Slavonic languages. Traditionally, what is identified as aspect (in a wide variety of languages throughout the world) was subsumed under the term 'tense'. For example, the Latin, French or English forms cantabat, chantait, was singing were classified as forms of the imperfect; and the imperfect was described as one of a set of tenses which differed from language to language, but included such other so-called tenses as the simple past, the perfect, the present, the future and the future perfect. Many writers of stan­dard reference grammars and many textbooks used in schools still employ those traditional terms and give them their tradi­tional interpretation. In doing so, they contribute to, and per­petuate, what has been correctly described as a long-standing "terminological, and conceptual, confusion of tense and aspect" (Comrie, 1976 : 1).

The definition of aspect is, if anything, even more controver­sial than is that of tense. But some parts of the difference between tense and aspect are clear enough and nowadays undisputed. The first is that, whereas tense is a deictic category, aspect is not. The second is that what are traditionally referred to as sep­arate tenses of the verb (such as the so-called imperfect of Latin, French or English) typically combine both tense and

10.4 The grammatical category of aspect 321

aspect. For example, was singing differs from is singing (deicti-cally) in tense, but not in aspect; conversely, was singing differs from sang in aspect, but not in tense. That the aspectual identity between was singing and is singing is non-deictic should be intui­tively obvious; and it is readily demonstrable, empirically, by paraphrase and other accepted techniques in the semanti-cist's armoury.

The same point that has just been made about the difference between was singing and sang can also be made about the differ­ence between cantabat and cantavit in Latin or chantait and chanta in standard literary French, even though neither of the Latin or French forms is semantically equivalent to either of the English forms; cantabat and cantavit (in one of its two meanings), on the one hand, and chantait and chanta, on the other, differ in aspect, but not in tense. In contrast with English, however, there is no comparable present-tense aspectual distinction: the present-tense forms cantat and chante cover the whole range that is cov­ered jointly by the aspectually distinct English forms is singing and sings. This is not untypical. There are many languages (with both tense and aspect) in which there are more past-tense than present-tense (or future tense) aspectual distinctions.

As I have said, the definition of aspect in general linguistic theory is controversial. One point of controversy is whether it is basically a temporal category or not. For simplicity of exposi­tion, I will here assume that it is. In making this assumption, I am tacitly presenting an objectivist, rather than a subjectivist, account of aspect (in a sense of 'subjective' and 'subjectivity' that will be explained in later sections of this chapter). Subjecti­vist theories of aspect would emphasize the speaker's (or locu-tionary agent's) point of view, rather than what are assumed to be the objective temporal characteristics of the situation (state of affairs, event, process, etc.) that is described by the preposi­tional content of the sentence that is uttered. Although I will not develop this point here, I should emphasize that, even if it is conceded that aspect is basically an objective, temporal, cat- egory, in all languages that have aspect there are many subjective uses of aspectually marked forms. Current accounts of aspect in