Tense, Aspect, and Aspectual Composition

Abstract

The idea of a compositional treatment of aspect in Slavic languages has recently been defended by several authors investigating aspectuality in these languages: e.g. Schoorlemmer (1995), Dimitrova-Vulchanova (1996) and Schmitt (1996). For Germanic languages a compositional approach was advocated in Verkuyl (1972). Compositionality turns out to work quite well, so the question arises how the two families can be united, the evident problem being that for Slavic languages it seems necessary to distinguish between aspect and Aktionsart, whereas this distinction has no clear formal correlate in Germanic languages. In Verkuyl (1993:318–327) attention was paid to a formal machinery relating a tenseless terminative or durative S to tense and in this way the Progressive Form in English could be dealt with in a compositional framework as one of the ways in which aspect may be distinguished from Aktionsart. Schoorlemmer, Dimitrova-Vulchanova and others provide evidence that such a distinction is justified in Slavic languges, but also that it differs from the traditional distinction based on aspectuality as a verbal matter, still found in modern Slavist work, e.g. in most papers of Flier and Brecht (1985) and Flier and Timberlake (1985). The present paper aims at bridging the gap between Slavic and non-Slavic languages by adopting the strategy to assume that Aktionsart and aspect are the same until there is evidence to the contrary, aspectuality being the term to cover the two traditional terms without any a priori commitment to the use of the two terms just mentioned. It will be shown that in Slavic but also Romance languages between the compositionally formed aspectual structure and tense there is room for an intermediate