Perfective Aspect Research Articles

SOME PROBLEMS OF INTERFERENCE IN THE USE OF ENGLISH VERBS BY NATIVE TAGALOG SPEAKERS

The forms signaled by the inflectional verb endings {‐s},{‐ed}, {‐en}, and {‐ing} in English, and categories involving these forms, are either absent or reinterpreted in Tagalog. The absence of obligatory distinctions of number and person in Tagalog verbs gives rise to a problem frequently observed even among highly educated Tagalog speakers of English, that of failing to mark consistently the third person singular verb. Voice is reinterpreted in Tagalog by the focus system, and English tense, with its multiple axes of orientation, by the single‐axis aspect system of Tagalog. The Tagalog imperfective aspect includes English “simple present” and all nonfuture {be + ‐ing} forms; the perfective aspect, English “simple past” and all {have + ‐en} forms. Furthermore, tense distinctions signaled by intlectional endings in English, such as those between past and non‐past {have + ‐en} forms, are often signaled in Tagalog only by non‐verbal markers. The interference problems traceable to this reinterpretation of English tense distinctions are the Tagalog speaker's inconsistent use of verbal markers to signal perfected events, and his tendency to overlook distinctions between past and non‐past forms of auxiliaries and between different {have + ‐en) and {be + ‐ing} forms.

Aspectual Variations in Russian and Serbo-Croatian

1. The most distinctive feature of the verbal system of a Slavic language is undoubtedly its verbal aspect. Stated simply, a particular Slavic verb has either perfective (P) aspect, which mean that a commitment as to completion has been added to the verb's basic meaning, or it has imperfective (I) aspect, in which is no such implication.' To express the meaning 'to write' in Russian, a choice has to be made between the two aspectual partners pisat' I 'to write, to be in the process of writing' and napisat' P to write, to get written, to complete the writing (of)'. There are also morphological implications to aspect, in that in certain constructs the selection of a verb form of a particular aspect is obligatory; for example, the periphrastic future of Russian permits only the use of an I verb, as in ja budu pisat' 'I will write, I will be writing' (*ja budu napisat' does not occur). Exceptions to this typical aspectual pairing, such as Russian obescat' 'to promise', which functions as either an I or a P verb, testify by their very oddity to the pervasiveness of the aspectual dichotomy.2 In the last hundred years, the Slavic languages have generated many verbs which have, for the most part, loan elements for their base, e.g. Russian patentovat' 'to patent'. A striking characteristic of these new verbs is that very many of them operate outside or only partially inside the traditional aspect system. Patentovat' is both I and P: it has two aspects-or, stated in another way, it has no aspect. I propose to examine this blurring or elimination of aspectual distinctions in the Slavic languages by considering the status of new verbs in two languages, Russian of the East Slavic group and Serbo-Croatian of the South Slavic group.

The Meaning of the Perfective Aspect in Russian

Farrell, James The leaning of the Perfective Aspect in Russian. Linguistic Circle of New York, N.Y.

The Historical Use of the Present Imperfective and the Present Perfective in Russian

In his very valuable book, Emplois des aspects du verbe russe (Paris, 1914), Prof. Andr6 Mazon analyses the various usages of the perfective and imperfective aspects and in connection with the present forms of both, he has a section on the Historical Present of the Imperfective (123-5) and on the Historical Present-Future or Present Perfective (149-59). Both of these sections deal with a very striking phenomenon of some portions of the Russian language. On the whole, he has handled the matter very carefully, but perhaps it may be possible to look at some of these cases a little more closely. The majority of the examples found in this volume are drawn from a restricted list of works, i.e., The Tales of Afanasyev, the Memoirs of a Sportsman of Turgenev, the Tales from Sevastopol of Tolstoy, the Storm of Ostrovsky, the Little Demon of Sologub, and some collections of proverbs, dictionaries, etc. These represent a fair survey of the Russian literature of the nineteenth century with certain important exceptions as poetry, Pushkin, Lermontov, etc. Let us therefore supplement this list by looking first at a few references from Pushkin which Mazon cites and discusses, particularly as to the present use of the present perfectives. Thus (133) he says 'Cette valeur de futur du pr6sent perfectif se constate avec une rigueur absolue pour tous les verbes perfectifs sans exception. Un tres petit nombre d'entre eux toutefois--et nous ne voulons point parler ici des verbes t6moignant d'une dualit6 d'aspect r6elle, c'est-6-dire susceptibles de poss6der un futur p6riphrastique-offre, en quelques cas tres rares, la valeur de pr6sent, a savoir padu, daruyu, konchu, et ryeshu.' He then cites three passages from Pushkin. The first of these is from the Evlega, a poem written in 1814, and it may repay us to reprint the entire stanza from which Mazon quotes two

A Note on the Russian Aspects

T HE elementary student of Russian, if he is not a trained philologist, is puzzled at the very beginning by the peculiarities in the use of the Russian aspects. The noun is for him merely a complicated declension which differs in degree but not in kind from that which we see in German, Latin, and Greek, but the verb introduces elements which seem extremely alien to our methods of thought. The present note is not intended to do more than give certain guides to the problem for practical use. In old Russian, prior to the sixteenth century, there do exist imperfects and aorists which function in a manner similar to the corresponding tenses in the other Indo-European languages. These dropped out and when the first reform of Russian took place in the seventeenth century survived only in the Russian Church Slavonic. In the eighteenth century, when the grammar was standardized on the model of Latin and the Latin terminology was adopted, they were definitely removed from the colloquial language as taught at the time. The grammarians, seeing the developed Latin tensesystem, sought for a substitute in their own language and achieved this by a fitting of the aspects into the tense-system to supply the future by the present of the perfective aspect. This is all very well so far as it goes, but a careful study of such a book as Mazon's Aspects du verbe russe will show that there are a large number of cases where the aspects have preserved something of their original meaning, even in the Russian classics of the nineteenth century. The original difference between the imperfective and perfective aspects is very similar to that which we find between the Greek perfect and aorist subjunctives and optatives and between the imperfect and aorist indicatives. The imperfective aspects represent a continuing process. The perfectives are without any durative sense and view the action as a mere puncture in eternity. They do not even imply completion of an action, except in so far as the mere naming of an action implies that it is carried through to completion. They merely state the fact of seeing, reading, etc., without comment or implication. Since the present is a rapidly passing instant, the use of the present perfective implies either the past or the future and it is from this circumstance, that the grammarians of the eighteenth century boldly equated the form with the future. We have the same tendency in the simple present in English but we use it so rarely that we do not think of it normally and rapidly. The following rough sketch of the relations between the English forms and the Russian is based on practical experience and will supply perhaps eighty per cent correctness in the use of the Russian aspects. It is not based on the history of the usage of these aspects.

The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi

Verbs in the Hopi language are noteworthy for their very rich and expressive development of verbal aspects and voices. I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semi-passive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two. It may be noted that there are no perfective and imperfective aspects; in fact Hopi does not in any way formalize as such the contrast between completion and incompletion of action. Its aspects formalize different varieties of the contrast between point-locus and extent-locus of phenomena, indifferently in time or space, or in both. Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative. Hopi verbs belong to seven classes or conjugations having slightly different inflectional systems. Class 1, the largest and most creative class, contains a few categories not found in the other classes, among them the segmentative aspect. The simplex of the Class 1 verb is a bare root of the form CVCV, and is in the third person singular intransitive voice, punctual aspect, and present-past tense. The segmentative aspect is formed by final reduplication of this root plus the durative suffix -ta, and produces a change in the meaning of the simplex of the folloxving character: the phenomenon denoted by the root, shown in the punctual aspect as manifested about a point, becomes manifested as a series of repeated interconnected segments of one large phenomenon of a stretched-out segmental character, its extension usually being predominantly in one dimension, indifferently of space or time or both. The nature of the change can best be shown by examples. ha'ri it is bent in a rounded angle hari'rita it lies in a meandering line, making successive rounded angles (applied for instance to meander patterns in decoration)