Abstract
Studies on aspect in English and many other languages in the last two decades have drawn heavily upon a classification of verbs and phrases which sprang up between the 1940s and 1960s in the writings of three scholars (Ryle 1949; Vendler 1957; Kenny 1963). In his article on verbal aspect in French, Garey (1957) also addressed many of the issues associated with the classification — which dealt mainly with the meanings of verbs and verb phrases in conjunction with their behaviour towards adverbials of time and the Progressive. As already seen in the discussion of Voroncova’s and Ivanova’s works, the idea of grouping verbs in English according to their aspectual characteristics had been hanging in the air for a long time, and was also tackled by non-native linguists. The origin of the idea could even be dated much further back, to the Old Greeks. Aristotle noticed that some verbs contained in their meaning a goal or result of the action denoted while other verbs did not. Today it is usually Vendler’s classification that is considered to be the best one, and, in studies of aspect and similar problems, it is his name that is most often associated with classifying verbs and verb phrases according to their aspectual properties. The Curious thing in that the three scholars, Ryle, Vendler and Kenny, were primarily interested in the philosophical implications of the language data they explored, and the importance of their work for linguistics and aspectology in particular came to be properly understood many years later.
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These verbs, present in all Slavic languages, usually have a couple of most typical endings (-iram or-iziram and-vam in Bulgarian, -irovat’ in Russian). And the prevailing majority of these verbs, not surprisingly, represents borrowings from the three major Western languages, English, German and French, or, more generally speaking, from the international, mostly Latin-based, lexicon. Here belong hundreds of verbs of intellectual or technical activities like organise (Bulg. organiziram, Russian organi-zirovat’), plan (Bulg. planiram and planuvam, Russ. planirovat’) electrify (Bulg. elektrificiram, Russ. elektrificirovat’) etc.
More on the delimitative later on, see Chapter Thirteen, On aspectual classes in English.
An anonymous reviewer of this work was unhappy with the stress laid on the several-decades-long misunderstanding of aspectual phenomena by the linguistic community (defined here as dogmatism). But if today a large number of linguists do regard aspect as a distinction between perfectivity and imper-fectivity (boundedness and non-boundedness) and view it as a phenomenon present in all languages, in the 1970s the conjecture that the structure of English features a perfective/imperfective distinction largely identical to that in the Slavic languages sounded like a heresy in most linguistic circles. It is a well-known fact today that Vendler’s and similar classifications, some published as early as the late 1940s, were not properly understood (in aspectological terms) until the 1980s. Verkuyl’s (1971) work, regarded today as a major contribution in the field (to be dealt with later), remained grossly misunderstood and underestimated throughout the 1970s and even in the 1980s, and, as will be shown in this book, many of its major theses remain misunderstood to the present day. On the other hand, many aspectologists still disagree dramatically on a large number of issues. The history of misunderstanding is probably worth investigating (elsewhere) in more detail. Is the reason behind the current advances in aspectology that progress in theoretical linguistics in the recent decades allowed a much better understanding of certain language phenomena? Or is it because gradually more and more scholars somehow came to be convinced that, after all, “there is aspect in English”?
As can be seen from some of Vendler’s examples, aspect can be explicated through the interchange between an object with or without an article. For instance, write a book basically denotes a completed action, that is, it explicates perfectivity and is an accomplishment in Vendler’s terms. Conversely, write books basically denotes a non-completed action, that is, it explicates imperfectivity and is either a state or an activity in Vendler’s terms. Or, as we shall see later, aspect is explicated compositionally in the sentence and the ‘article’/’zero article’ interchange is one of the major aspects of the compositional explication of aspect. Smith (1991: 7–8) recognises the compositional mechanism of aspect but only at the level of the ‘situation-type’, not at the level of the ‘viewpoint’ (see the following chapter in this book dealing with compositional aspect theory).
Smith’s approach is followed by Mellor (1995) who goes even much further, suggesting that “while the English simple aspect only allows a completed event reading, the Russian perfective can have either this reading or the result state reading” (Mellor 1995: 61). It has already been made clear that a model of this kind, assigning perfectivity to nonprogressive verb forms in English and confusing aspect with the totally different category of perfect, is entirely incompatible with the approach in this book.
A handful of examples will suffice to show Smith’s rather idiosyncratic account of Russian aspect. The author describes the Russian sentence On napisal pfv pis’mo ‘He wrote a letter’ as an accomplishment by saying that a perfective viewpoint is imposed on an accomplishment sentence (Smith 1991: 301). But if ‘situation type’ is a covert category in Russian, as the author maintained earlier (Smith 1991: 298), where does the accomplishment here arise from? Is it inherent in the perfective expression napisat’pismo ‘write a letter’, or is it somehow extracted from the imperfective expression pisat’ pis’mo ‘write a letter’? Smith does not give an answer to this question, but one could guess, because, in spite of her own contention that situation type is covert in Russian, Smith does assign situation types to verbs from time to time (as mentioned earlier) — without motivating the choice of the situation type. For example, the perfective verb pomoé’ ‘help’ is for some reason held to be an activity (Smith 1991: 307), the imperfective citat’ ‘read’ is defined as an accomplishment, and the perfective dat’ ‘give’ as an achievement. Indeed, different authors assign situation types to Slavic verbs differently: Klein (1995: 677), for example, assigns both the perfective dat’ ‘give’ and the imperfective davat’ ‘give’ an accomplishment value. More importantly, however, it can be argued that excluding the contribition of nominal complements from the analysis is to ultimately render any explanation of aspect (be it verbal or compositional aspect) insufficient. Note that assigning an accomplishment value to čitat’ ‘read’ is much more implausible than assigning an accomplishment value to English read — for čitat’ is an imperfective verb, while English read could be regarded as collocable with NPs like a/the/this book, some/three books, etc. that are capable of imputing an accomplishment value to the whole phrase. Furthermore, an important issue for Russian aspect is why perfective verbs do not always signify bounded situations, and why imperfective verbs do not always signify non-bounded situations. Apparently aware of it, Smith (1991: 306) affords it no explanation. If her theory of imposing perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situation types is to be followed in an attempt at solving the issue, a third component would have to be posited, consisting of, say, a bounded and a non-bounded viewpoint, to be imposed onto a perfective or imperfective viewpoint. This issue has in fact already found a sufficiently elegant solution in Lindstedt’s so-called nested aspects, in a publication quoted in Smith’s book-Lindstedt(1985). In a recent article Smith (1999: 503) made a certain correction of her 1991 system but preserved it as a whole. More on this in Chapter 13, On Aspectual Classes in English.
Note that in both cases the verb is imperfectively marked twice! First, with the imperfective aspect of the lexical entries imam ‘have’ (a very strong, prototypical, lexical stative) and struvam ‘cost’; second, with the imperfectivity of the Imperfect (Past) Tense.
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Kabakčiev, K. (2000). Vendler’s Classification of Situations, and the Problem of Its Interpretation. In: Aspect in English. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9355-7_2
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