An epistemic approach to aspectual systems

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter we analyse the aspectual systems of English and Russian, and to a lesser extent Czech and Mandarin Chinese. We thereby discuss the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of exclusively temporal accounts of the aspectual constructions under consideration, and propose an epistemic alternative. This epistemic approach attaches central importance to the knowledge sets of the discourse participants, who may construe situations as fully and instantly identifiable, or—conversely—as contingent, and use aspectual devices as grounding devices to indicate this epistemic difference. We devote specific attention to differences between languages in terms of how the concepts of full and instant identifiability and contingency are morphologically and semantically realized. In doing so, we lay the foundation for a cross-linguistic typology that can serve as a backbone for the analysis of typologically diverse aspectual systems in epistemic rather than temporal terms.