A. What is 'aspect'?

The term 'aspect' designates the perspective taken on the internal temporal organisation of the situation, and so 'aspects' distinguish different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of the same situation. 'Situation' is meant here as a general term covering events, processes, states, etc., as expressed by the verb phrase or the verb construction. Unlike tense, which is situation-external time and deictic, aspect is situation-internal and non-deictic, as it is not concerned with relating the time of the situation to any other time point. The aspectual meaning of a clause can be broken up into two independent aspectual components: 1. Aspectual viewpoint - this is the temporal perspective from which the situation is presented. An aspectual viewpoint can span an entire situation, as in the perfective, or it can span only part of it, as in the imperfective. The perfective indicates that the situation is to be viewed as a bounded whole, the situation is seen from outside, without necessarily distinguishing any of its internal structure. The imperfective considers the situation from its inside temporal boundaries, and it is crucially concerned with its internal temporal structure. Perfectivity and imperfectivity are not objective properties of situations, and so the same situation can be presented from either viewpoint. In the sentence John read that book yesterday; while he was reading it, the postman came, the different forms of the verb 'read' refer to the same situation of reading (which in both cases is located in the past through the use of the appropriate tense), but the situation is presented in two different ways, with a difference in aspect.

2. Situation type - situations unfold in time in different ways. This component of the aspectual meaning of a clause indirectly classifies the situation according to its temporal properties. Vendler and Smith (1967, 1997) distinguish five types of situation: state, activity, accomplishment, semelfactive, and achievement. They differ in the temporal properties of dynamism, durativity, and telicity. The following table provides a summary of situation types: Situation type state Temporal properties stative, durative; (N.B. telicity is irrelevant to stative situations) dynamic, durative, atelic dynamic, durative and telic (i.e. consisting of process and outcome) dynamic, atelic, punctual (i.e. nondurative/instantaneous) dynamic, telic, punctual (i.e. nondurative/instantaneous) Examples know the answer, love Mary laugh, stroll in the park build a house, walk to school, learn Greek tap, knock

activity accomplishment

semelfactive

achievement

win a race, reach the top

B. Expressions of 'aspect' Verbs tend to have inherent aspectual meaning because the situations described by them tend to have inherent temporal properties. Three types of lexical aspectual oppositions are frequently identified: 1. Punctual and durative - these refer to situations which are not conceived of as lasting in time (punctual), versus situations which are conceived of as lasting for a certain period of time, however short it may be (durative). Inherently punctual situations can be further interpreted as

semelfactive (taking place only once) or iterative (repeated). Many languages recognise a class of verbs that under normal circumstances can only refer to punctual situations. 2. Telic and atelic - these refer to situations which have an internal structure consisting of a process leading up to the terminal point (telic), versus situations which do not have an inherent endpoint (atelic). In this semantic distinction, it is particularly clear that situations are not described by verbs alone, but rather by the verb with its arguments (subject and objects), and it is in fact difficult to find sentences that are unambiguously telic or atelic. The telic nature of a situation can often be tested as follows: "if a sentence referring to this situation in a form with imperfective meaning (such as the Progressive) implies the sentence referring to the same situation in a form with perfective meaning (such as the English Perfect), then the situation is atelic; otherwise it is telic. Thus from John is singing one can deduce John has sung, but from John is making a chair one cannot deduce John has made a chair. Thus a telic situation is one that involves a process that leads up to a well-defined terminal point, beyond which the process cannot continue." N.B. The term 'telic situation' corresponds most closely to Vendler's (1967:102) 'accomplishment'. 3. Stative and dynamic - roughly, these refer to situations which continue and do not change over time (stative), versus situations which involve necessarily change (dynamic). More precisely, with a state, unless something happens to change that state, the state will continue (e.g. standing, or knowing). With a dynamic situation, the situation will only continue if it is continually subject to a new input of energy, whether from inside or from outside (e.g. running, or emitting light). Since punctual situations inherently involve a change of state, they are always dynamic. Source: http://www.features.surrey.ac.uk/features/aspect.html

Sometimes the distinction between states and non-states is referred to as 'states' and 'actions'. However, the term 'action' is also used in a more restricted sense, for a dynamic situation that requires the involvement of an agent. Similarly, the term 'event' is used to refer to a dynamic situation viewed perfectively, and the term 'process' - to a dynamic situation viewed imperfectively. The lexical aspectual meaning, or inherent meaning, is frequently referred to as Aktionsart. C. The values of 'aspect' The minimal set of aspectual values is two, with the most frequent opposition being perfective versus imperfective. Many languages have a single category to express imperfectivity, in some languages an aspectual category may correspond only to a part of the meaning of imperfectivity, and in others imperfectivity may be subdivided into a number of distinct categories. Comrie (1976:25) offers the following diagrammatic representation of the most typical divisions within the set of aspectual values:

Habituality refers to situations which are characteristic of an extended period of time, so extended that the situation is viewed as a characteristic feature of a whole period. The decision that a situation constitues a characteristic feature of an extended period of time is not in itself linguistic, but once it has been made, an explicitly habitual form can be used to describe it. Habituality can in principle be combined with any other semantic aspectual values appropriate to situations that can be protracted in time or iterated. Continuousness can be defined negatively as imperfectivity that is not habituality. Progressiveness is defined as the combination of progressive meaning (referring to a situation in progress, but not habitual) with nonstative meaning. Since languages have different criteria for classifying predicates as stative or not, they may have different rules for determining when explicitly progressive forms can be used. In many languages aspects express different groupings of the semantic distinctions captured in the diagram. For example, Romanian, in the past tense, has a distinction between perfective and imperfective. The category of aspect itself may be optional in some languages which have grammaticalised aspectual distinctions. Specifically, there are aspectual systems which allow sentences with no realisation of an aspect value. Such sentences are aspectually vague, i.e. neither perfective nor imperfective, and "more flexible than either viewpoint in that they allow both open and closed readings", though "the context often indicates the favoured interpretation". D. Problem cases Is English Progressive an expression of progressive aspect? The English Progressive form has a number of specific uses that do not seem

to fit under the general definition of progressiveness. That is, it can be used to refer to a temporary state or to a habitual situation that holds for a relatively limited period, and it can also have some purely idiosyncratic uses. In conclusion, one should pay attention to the relation between name/label and function; there is not a perfect correspondence between the two. What is the difference between the perfective and the perfect? The perfective is a type of aspect and it is concerned with a particular way of representing the internal temporal constitution of a situation. The perfect tells us nothing directly about the situation itself, but is typically understood as relating some state to a preceding situation, which makes it closer in meaning to tense than to aspect.