Chapter 13. The different grammars of event singularisation
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Eric Corre
Abstract
This chapter is an empirical investigation into the expression of bounded single situations across four languages, based on a parallel corpus (Camus’s The Stranger and translations into English, Russian, Hungarian). Smith (1991)’s two-component theory of aspect, whereby situation aspect combines with viewpoint aspect to compute the aspectual composition of sentences, is used to highlight cross-linguistic differences. In the original, the French passé composé appears as perfective in the sense of Smith (1991) and Klein (1994) while the English simple past is aspectually ambiguous (perfective and imperfective). Russian relies on a morphosyntactic construction (prefix + bare verb) to create perfective verbs, while Hungarian has similar morphosyntactic resources, but no grammatical aspect.
Abstract
This chapter is an empirical investigation into the expression of bounded single situations across four languages, based on a parallel corpus (Camus’s The Stranger and translations into English, Russian, Hungarian). Smith (1991)’s two-component theory of aspect, whereby situation aspect combines with viewpoint aspect to compute the aspectual composition of sentences, is used to highlight cross-linguistic differences. In the original, the French passé composé appears as perfective in the sense of Smith (1991) and Klein (1994) while the English simple past is aspectually ambiguous (perfective and imperfective). Russian relies on a morphosyntactic construction (prefix + bare verb) to create perfective verbs, while Hungarian has similar morphosyntactic resources, but no grammatical aspect.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
- Chapter 2. A quantitative perspective on modality and future tense in French and German 19
- Chapter 3. The temporal uses of French devoir and Estonian pidama (‘must’) 41
- Chapter 4. The competition between the present conditional and the prospective imperfect in French over the centuries: First results 65
- Chapter 5. Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish 83
- Chapter 6. Expressing sources of information, knowledge and belief in English and Spanish informative financial texts 109
- Chapter 7. Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Old Catalan 145
- Chapter 8. ‘I think’ 165
- Chapter 9. Embedding evidence in Tagalog and German 185
- Chapter 10. Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts 213
- Chapter 11. Non-finiteness, complementation and evidentiality 239
- Chapter 12. The perfect in Avar and Andi 261
- Chapter 13. The different grammars of event singularisation 281
- Chapter 14. Phraseological usage patterns of past tenses 309
- Chapter 15. Path scales 335
- Name Index 357
- Subject index 363
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
- Chapter 2. A quantitative perspective on modality and future tense in French and German 19
- Chapter 3. The temporal uses of French devoir and Estonian pidama (‘must’) 41
- Chapter 4. The competition between the present conditional and the prospective imperfect in French over the centuries: First results 65
- Chapter 5. Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish 83
- Chapter 6. Expressing sources of information, knowledge and belief in English and Spanish informative financial texts 109
- Chapter 7. Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Old Catalan 145
- Chapter 8. ‘I think’ 165
- Chapter 9. Embedding evidence in Tagalog and German 185
- Chapter 10. Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts 213
- Chapter 11. Non-finiteness, complementation and evidentiality 239
- Chapter 12. The perfect in Avar and Andi 261
- Chapter 13. The different grammars of event singularisation 281
- Chapter 14. Phraseological usage patterns of past tenses 309
- Chapter 15. Path scales 335
- Name Index 357
- Subject index 363
