6.4 Aspect and lexicon

Mood, tense, and aspect 399

Morphologically, aspect is not wholly transparent, for there is no single, unique morphological expression of perfective or imperfective aspect in verbs (§§6.4.3--6.4.4). However, there is a limited number of strategies. They differ somewhat, but still have the effect of making verbs unambiguously perfective or imperfective.

As a rule, verbs come in pairs of perfective and imperfective. That is, for a given perfective verb, there is a corresponding imperfective with the same meaning (same except for aspect), and, conversely, for a given imperfective verb, there is a unique perfective with the same meaning. However, the nature of pairing depends on the morphological strategy. In recognition of that fact, relations among aspectual partners or near-partners are written in two forms below. The relation of prefixed perfective and secondary imperfective is written with the perfective first, as lj-gbcƒnm<pf>/ lj-g∫csdfnm<if> ‘finish writing’. In contrast, the relation of a simplex imperfective to a prefixed perfective (near-) partner is written with the imperfective first, for example, kmcn∫nm<if>\gjkmcn∫nm<pf> ‘flatter’. Similarly, semelfactive perfectives are treated as dependent on the base simplex, and are written as vf[ƒnm<if>\ vf[yénm<pf> ‘wave’ (§6.4.5).

Aspect is not only lexical and morphological, it is also contextual. Whether there is definitive change is evaluated with respect to a c o n t e x t u a l o c c a - s i o n , a time and world which the speaker deems relevant and worthy of discussion. In [113], the speaker names the contextual time explicitly.

[113]D rjywt b/kz yjxm/ z dsitk<pf> bp gjtplf yf Rjdhjdcrjv djrpfkt.

Ljyjcbkbcm<if> pderb jnlfktyyjq fhnbkkthbqcrjq rfyjyfls, ujhbpjyn jcdtofkcz<if> dcgsirfvb dscnhtkjd.

One night at the end of June I got out of the train at the Kovrovsky Station. There carried sounds of distant artillery fire, the horizon was lit up by the flares of shells.

In [113], the process of exiting from the train is bounded, definitive, in the sense that no further exiting, in this context, is expected. This definitive change is expressed by the perfective verb dßitk. More generally, aspect in Slavic hangs on the notion of a limit in context. To use a perfective, there must be change that approaches and reaches a limit. The limit is such that, once it is reached at the contextual occasion, no further change is projected afterwards; only a static continuation of the state is projected.17 Thus a verb that is perfective, when it is used in context, reports a definitive change with respect to some

17 Maslov emphasizes the importance of the “internal” or “intrinsic” limit (1948, 1973, 1984[b]). Dowty 1979 makes explicit the idea that aspect involves projecting the future from the contextual occasion -- by anticipation, Augustine would say.

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delimited contextual occasion. A verb that is imperfective reports continuity and absence of definitive change over an occasion or occasions. In [113], the sounds and flashes are perceived (ljyjc∫kbcm, jcdtoƒkcz) at the contextual occasion, the point at which the narrator exits the train. They were perceptible before and will continue to be so afterwards. It is the extension of these perceptions beyond the contextual occasion that justifies using the imperfective in [113]. Example [113] illustrates one way in which a state or activity can fail to be a definitive change over a delimited occasion. There are other ways, and they result in somewhat different senses of imperfective verbs, such as the iterative or durative senses (§§6.5.4--6.5.8, 6.5.10).

The contextual side of aspect -- its interaction with times and worlds -- shades into the way in which aspect helps shape discourse and text. We might operate with a tripartite classification of discourse structures.18 N a r r a t i v e presumes a dynamic whereby events follow each other in sequence. Each event starts from the prior situation and proceeds to a new result, which in turn becomes the starting point for the next subsequent event. Narrative, then, involves both temporal succession and modal causality. Narrative is ordinarily expressed by past-tense perfective verbs, unless the perspective is shifted (as in the “historical” use of the present tense). Language is used not only to narrate but also to talk about states of the world that overlap and coexist in time and circumstance. In this mode of language, d e s c r i p t i o n , the focus is on the complexity of the world, on the coexistence of states, rather than (as in narrative) on the replacement of one state of the world by another. Description is by nature non-changing (hence characteristically imperfective) and coincident in time (hence present tense, or the equivalent of a present displaced to the past or future realm), and realis. And third, speakers use language not only to talk about what was or what is. Language is also used to understand what might be, to compare the reality of the here and now of speech with possibilities: with what alternative states of reality might be imagined instead of the current one, and with possible changes in the future. The third mode is prolepsis, anticipation, divination -- in the broadest terms, m o da l i t y . This mode allows both aspects (though prefers perfective); it is future or irrealis modality.

These discourse or even cognitive categories are highly idealized. These three modes are not strictly temporal nor aspectual nor modal, but all three at once. The relation between these three modes of discourse and the category of aspect (and also tense and mood) is indirect. They are not expressed unambiguously by a single aspect or tense in a one-to-one fashion. There can be complex vectors; a present state can be attached to an event in the past, for example. In

18 Expanding from the bipartite division of Benveniste 1959, Weinrich 1964.

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for example, the activity is repeated, even though on each occasion it may reach the limit (yf rf;ljq jcnfyjdrt jy ,hjcfk d rfcce vjytnrb b jnrhexbdfk<if> ct,t ,bktn ‘at each stop he put money in the box and twisted himself off a ticket’); the activity with a potential limit is caught in progress (ujcnb vjkxfkb, htrnjh Rfqpth cnfhfntkmyj jnrhexbdfk<if> geujdbwe e cvjrbyuf ‘the guests were silent, Rector Kaiser was assiduously twisting off the button on his jacket’); the import is the existence of an activity or attempted activity (Cthutq jnrhexbdfk<if> ,jkn b gjntk ‘Sergei was trying to unscrew the bolt and was sweating’); or some details of the activity as it progresses are reported (jy yt gjvybn, ult jy ghj,re jnrhexbdfk<if> ‘he doesn’t remember where he twisted the stopper out’). These prefixed perfectives that have a sense of continuous activity readily form secondary imperfectives, and the morphologically derived secondary imperfectives are particularly close in meaning to the corresponding perfectives. Together, qualitative perfectives and their secondary imperfectives are true aspectual pairs.

Other senses of prefixes place limits on the very nature of the activity; they treat the activity in discrete quanta. Such prefixed perfectives could be termed quantifying or even q u a n t i z i n g , since they deal with discrete quanta of activity.21 The activity either exists or not, or exists over a certain quantity of time, or leads to a certain measurable, quantitative result. For example, pfuhecn∫nm ‘begin to be sad’ talks about the inception of a state, where inception is quantitative, in the sense that the activity goes from none to some; gjuhecn∫nm ‘be sad a bit’ attenuates the duration of the state to a limited period; yf-ckéifnmcz (dczrb[ yt,skbw j yfc TOLKIENbcnf[) ‘listen to a sufficient quantity (of all kinds of nonsense about us Tolkien fans)’ means that a large quantity of nonsense has been heard. Quantizing perfectives have an all-or-nothing quality to them. The quantum result is achieved only over a whole interval of time. For this reason, such perfectives form secondary imperfectives reluctantly. There are no regular secondary imperfectives associated with pf-uhecn∫nm, gj-uhecn∫nm, or yf-ckéifnmcz. When quantizing perfectives do form secondary imperfectives, the imperfective is often used only in a specific sense, the iterative sense of achieving the quantitative result over multiple separate occasions: yf-rhéxbdfnm<if> is a possible imperfective, but only in the sense of repeated instances of preparing in quantity.

While prefixed perfectives and their corresponding secondary imperfectives form canonical aspect pairs, the status of simplex verbs is less transparent. Because (as a rule) simplex verbs simply name a state or activity, they have no intrinsic boundaries, and (as a rule) are imperfective. If a context demands a

21 Isaˇcenko 1975 calls the distinction modificational vs. quantitative. E. Adger Williams (p.c.) suggested the term “quantizing” -- operating with discrete quanta rather than scalar properties.