Perspectives On Aspect And Aktionsart

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: This paper aims at a closer examination of aspectuality in English. It illustrates the importance of a category which has only scarcely received attention in the study of the English language (cf. Binnick 1991). When it comes to the analysis of situations, the focus is on the verbal category 'tense,' which relates the temporal location of the situation to other points in time. The category of 'aspect' is closely connected to tense, because it provides important information about the internal temporal structure of situations. Nonetheless it is often less familiar to speakers of the English language, referring to, among others, the works of Comrie (1967), Brinton (1988), Binnick (1991) and Kortmann (1991). According to their studies, English lacks formal markers of aspect, whereas the realization of tense in English is quite obvious and thus much discussed. 1.1 Central Questions Based on Binnick's (1991) description of 'aspectuality,' it is necessary to clarify this concept in detail. The central questions for this examination will be: 1. How can aspectuality be inferred from utterances when English lacks aspectual markers? 2. Are there systematic approaches that are concerned with the interaction of 'aspect' and 'Aktionsart' as defined by Comrie (1976) and Vendler (1957)? 3. In which ways do aspectual properties influence or change the semantic meaning of utterances and why? 4. What are the combination options of aspectual perspectives and properties and are there any restrictions consequent on the interaction of different aspectual values? This paper serves not just to answer these questions, but also tries to differentiate between the various subcategories of aspectuality,' which are in general difficult to distinguish properly. [...]

Almost all verbs in Slovene (one of the least researched Slavic languages) have two aspectually different forms, the perfective (PF) and the imperfective (IF). But in institutional settings or settings strongly marked with social hierarchy, only the second, the imperfective form, is used by Slovene speakers in a performative sense. Why is that? And what, in fact, has a Slovene speaker said if (s)he has used the imperfective verb in “performative circumstances”? No doubt that (s)he may be in the process of accomplishing such an act. But at the same time, having the possibility of choosing between the PF and the IF form, (s)he may have also indicated that this act hasn’t been accomplished (yet): as long as we are only promising (IF), we have not really promised anything yet, and if we are only promising (IF), we cannot take anything as having been really promised. That was how Stanislav Škrabec, the 19th century Slovene linguist and the central figure of this book, saw the role of verbal aspect within language use. Being caught in such a dilemma, a question inevitably arises: how do we accomplish an act of promise (or any other performative act) in Slovene? That dilemma – whether to use the perfective or imperfective aspect when accomplishing performative acts – may seem more than artificial at first, but it was very much alive among Slovene linguists at the end of the 19th century. And it was that very dilemma that quite unexpectedly gave rise to the foundations of performativity in Slovene, half a century before Austin! In the present book, the authors try to shed light on this controversy that involved different Slovene scholars for about thirty years, and propose a delocutive hypothesis as a solution for the performative dilemma this controversy unveiled.

This Handbook is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that current form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas.

This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.

The volume proposes original semantic analyses on grammatical aspect, dealing with some less studied forms coding aspect, revisiting or challenging certain conventionalized views on aspectual categories and shedding light on interactions between aspect and modality, another multifaceted semantic category.