Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity

Karolina Zuchewicz

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2024-0072

Article Open Access

Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity

Karolina Zuchewicz

Published/Copyright: October 22, 2024

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Submit Manuscript Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

This article investigates grammatical aspect in Slavic and non-Slavic languages, starting from Slavic languages, by providing crosslinguistic evidence for the presence of the so-called concept-dependent default aspect. This line of research builds on and extends accounts that draw a parallel between the structure and semantics of aspect. I show that structural simplicity (relating to whether the imperfective or the perfective is the derivation base for the respective reverse form) corresponds to prominence in meaning. More precisely, I assume that (im)perfective basic morphological or syntactic representations are indicators for primary interpretations. By building upon existing studies in typology, I introduce typological homogeneity as a criterion for the establishment of a form-meaning (in Slavic morpho-semantic) relationship within (im)perfective realizations of a particular verbal concept. This criterion complements high frequency and preferred choice in associative experiments as properties of aspectual alpha-verbs. In this paper, I discuss typological homogeneity by using the primary example of verbs of evidence collection, also called reveal-type predicates, and by additionally discussing manner-of-speaking and speech act verbs. These novel data provide evidence of typological homogeneity in the aspectual representation.

Keywords: aspect; language comparison; morpho-semantics

1 Introduction

There are different ways to express aspectual meanings. In Slavic languages, as in Polish in (1) and (2), aspect is a grammatical category. This implies the presence of a systematic distinction between perfective and imperfective interpretations of verbal events by grammatical means (Dahl and Velupillai 2013). In Slavic, grammatical marking translates to morphological marking: derivational pairs give rise to the presence of imperfective ongoing/habitual, as in (1), and perfective temporally delimited interpretations of events, as in (2).^[1]

(1)

Polish
Jan	malował	sztuczną	żabę	na	niebiesko.
Jan	painted.ipfv	artificial	frog	on	blue
‘Jan was covering the artificial frog with blue paint.’

(2)

Polish
Jan	pomalował	sztuczną	żabę	na	niebiesko.
Jan	painted.pfv	artificial	frog	on	blue
‘Jan has completely painted the artificial frog blue.’

Aspectual meanings can also be carried by freely insertable elements, for instance the progressive particle đang in Vietnamese, as seen in (3).

(3)

Vietnamese
Anna	đang	chứng minh	[là	Max	ăn trộm].
Anna	prog	prove	that	Max	steal
‘Anna was proving that Max was a thief.’

This paper discusses the structural representation of the perfective and the imperfective interpretation of chosen verbal concepts: proving, yelling, and convincing. Relative to these concepts, I investigate which of the two aspectual meanings tends to be expressed without exponents or by simpler means. I use the terms “basic” or “inherent” aspect synonymously and in relation to the structurally simpler aspectual realization of a particular verbal concept. I further use the term “optional” aspect to refer to the structurally more complex aspectual realization of a verbal concept. I assume that the basic aspect gives rise to a more natural aspectual meaning (“more typical” in the sense of Lehmann [1993], and following Becker and Malchukov [2022]). Crucially, I do not focus on the relationship between basic aspect and (im)perfective meaning in isolation, but in direct relation to a particular concept. As already mentioned, I state that the basic aspect indicates the more natural aspectual meaning of a concept. Related observations have been made by, among others, Zinova (2021) for Russian and Młynarczyk (2004) for Polish.

An anonymous reviewer asks about the relationship between basic aspect and Vendler’s (1957) verb classification. Verbal concepts analyzed in my paper are subsets of Vendler’s verb classes, with ‘prove’ and ‘convince’ belonging to the accomplishments (collecting evidence/carrying out steps toward evidence collection, and creating a line of argument, respectively) and ‘yell’ to the activities. Accomplishments have been shown to prefer the basic perfective aspect and activities the basic imperfective aspect. Important contributions have been made by, among others, Anstatt (2003), Becker and Malchukov (2022), Lehmann (1993), and Malchukov (2019). A detailed analysis of individual lexemes may lead to a reorganization of the members of particular classes.

According to Lehmann (1993: 265), in Russian (but also throughout all Slavic languages), we can find both functionally typical verbs (referred to as alpha-verbs) and functionally atypical verbs (referred to as beta-verbs) within the aspectual subcategories of the perfective and the imperfective aspects. The classification of a verbal form as (aspectually) typical or atypical is motivated by the objective characteristics of a situation; see Table 1 for specific examples. Functionally typical verbs tend to be formally unmarked, more frequently used, and cognitively privileged. More precisely, if an imperfective verb is functionally typical for a certain verbal situation, it is expected to be formally simpler, more frequent in language use, and the preferred choice in associative experiments compared to its perfective twin.^[2] The same goes for the perfective if it fulfills the abovementioned criteria. For example, in the case of ‘discover’, the perfective – that is, the right-boundary-expressing perspective on the event of discovering (something) – seems to be more typical for the situation per se than the respective imperfective perspective. Along this line of reasoning, Bohnemeyer and Swift (2004) introduce the notion of default aspect: they propose that telic predicates, that is, predicates that are quantized, are zero-marked for perfectivity (that is, perfective aspect is their default aspect).

Table 1:

Alpha- and beta-verbs within the perfective and the imperfective aspects across Slavic languages, based on Lehmann (1993: 267) for Russian.

Perfective aspect		Imperfective aspect
Alpha-verbs	Beta-verbs	Alpha-verbs	Beta-verbs
odkryć (Polish) otkrytʼ (Russian) odkrýt (Czech) odkrytʼ (Slovak) ‘discover’	za grać (Polish) s ygratʼ (Russian) za hrát (Czech) za hratʼ (Slovak) ‘play’	grać (Polish) igratʼ (Russian) hrát (Czech) hratʼ (Slovak) ‘play’	odkr *ywa* ć (Polish) otkr *yva* tʼ (Russian) odkr *ýva* t (Czech) odkr *ýva* tʼ (Slovak) ‘discover’

2 The notion of typological homogeneity

Based on Russian, Lehmann (1993) defines two criteria for a verb to count as an alpha-verb that are independent of the aspectual system of a given language: higher frequency of a particular aspectual realization compared to the reverse one and its preference in associative experiments.

The dominance of a particular aspect among different groups of verbs has also been discussed in the typological literature. Becker and Malchukov (2022) conducted an extensive corpus study based on parallel movie subtitles (ParTy corpus; Levshina 2016) in Russian, Czech, Hungarian, and German. They noticed an interaction between Vendler’s verb classes and (im)perfectivity in all investigated languages. Whereas states and activities tend to occur in the imperfective aspect, accomplishments and achievements are usually assigned the perfective value (in line with Croft 2012; Sasse 2002). Building upon Becker (2018), the authors propose and quantitatively validate the actionality hierarchy, which assumes a gradual character of the strength of the correlation between verb classes and aspectual values. States and achievements represent complementary poles, with the former being almost exclusively realized by imperfective and the latter by perfective verbs (Becker and Malchukov 2022: 57). In mismatch cases (when the aspectual system, for instance in Polish, still allows states to be both imperfective and perfective), aspectual coercion needs to take place to make states suitable for the perfective semantics (cf. Breu 1994). In this case, states receive an inchoative or a delimitative interpretation.

I provide further evidence for Becker and Malchukov’s (2022) observations by analyzing novel crosslinguistic data: the verbal concepts ‘prove’, ‘convince’, and ‘yell’. I further discuss which lexical/aspect-related components reoccur in language comparison and which are rather language-specific. I introduce the notion of typological homogeneity, which refers to uniformity in structure, meaning, or both that holds beyond a single language. Whereas micro-typological investigations focus on genealogically related or geographically connected languages, macro-typological studies include samples of languages from throughout the world that are or may be unconnected. The present paper provides evidence from both related and unrelated languages. Applied to the form-meaning relationship of aspect mentioned above, if such a relationship holds crosslinguistically, it tells us something about the aspectual representation of a particular concept in general, and not only about its representation in a single language, language family, or areal. In the following, I will apply the criterion of typological homogeneity to reveal-type predicates.

2.1 Structural makeup of reveal-type predicates based on Polish

Reveal-type predicates relate to incremental processes of evidence collection (Zuchewicz 2020). I use the terms “reveal-type predicates” and “verbs of evidence collection” synonymously. Reveal-type predicates like ‘prove’, ‘reveal’, or ‘show’ can take both propositional arguments (that-sentences: ‘x proved/revealed/showed that …’) and nominal arguments (‘x proved/revealed/showed it’). The imperfective and the perfective meaning of verbs of evidence collection correspond to different stages of an incremental process (see Anstatt [2003] and Krifka [1989, 1992] for aspect-related incrementality). Membership in the reveal-type class requires perfective meaning that entails the presence of proof for an embedded proposition, that is, a desired result of an investigation. The presence of proof is verifiable via the veridical interpretation of a matrix predicate (cf. the empirical investigation for Polish in Zuchewicz [2020]).^[3] The imperfective meaning of reveal-type predicates does not have such an implication. Hence, imperfective reveal-type predicates are non-veridical (based on Zuchewicz [2020]). Polish reveal-type predicates include pokazać ‘show’, wykazać ‘reveal’, and udowodnić, dowieść ‘prove’.

I treat the Polish prefixes po- as in pokazać ‘show’ and wy- as in wykazać ‘reveal’ as lexical (non-aspectual) prefixes (cf. Klimek-Jankowska and Błaszczak 2022). They systematically allow secondary imperfectivization (see also Wiland 2012), meaning that it is the secondarily imperfectivized variant that is their imperfective twin.

2.2 Typological homogeneity in the aspectual representation of reveal-type predicates

In this section, I will show that the structurally simpler form of reveal-type predicates corresponds to their perfective meaning across languages from different language families and with diverse aspectual systems.^[4] Furthermore, the perfective meaning always entails the correct result of an investigation; see (4) for Ukrainian and (5) for Croatian.^[5]

(4)

Ukrainian
Ala	#dovela	/	dovodyla,	scho	Marek	vynen,	… [but he wasn’t].
Ala	proved.pfv	/	proved.ipfv	that	Marek	guilty
‘Ala has proved/was proving that Marek was guilty, but it wasn’t him.’

(5)

Croatian
Anna	je	#dokazala	/	dokazivala,	da	je	Max	lopov,	… [but he wasn’t].
Anna	aux	proved.pfv	/	proved.ipfv	that	aux	Max	thief
‘Anna has proved/was proving that Max was a thief, but it wasn’t him.’

An analogous form-meaning correspondence applies to non-Slavic languages as well. Table 2 contains information from 15 languages with diverse ways of encoding the perfective and the imperfective ‘prove’. In all these languages, using the simpler form enforces truth entailment. This suggests that a concept of proving has a primary perfective meaning that systematically goes along with simpler marking compared to the respective imperfective realization.

Table 2:

Basic perfective marking of ‘prove’ across languages.^a

Verbal concept: “reveal-type”	Language	Language family	Encoding of aspectual variants of ‘prove’^b	Aspectual meaning of the basic variant
‘prove’	Polish	West Slavic	Morphological	Perfective
	Czech	West Slavic	Morphological	Perfective
	Slovak	West Slavic	Morphological	Perfective
	Ukrainian	East Slavic	Morphological	Perfective
	Russian	East Slavic	Morphological	Perfective
	Croatian	South Slavic	Morphological	Perfective
	Persian	Indo-Iranian, Iranian	Morphological	Perfective
	Tamil	Dravidian	Morphological	Perfective
	Hebrew	Afro-Asiatic, Semitic	Syntactic	Perfective
	Turkish	Turkic	Syntactic	Perfective
	Hungarian	Uralic	Syntactic	Perfective
	Mandarin	Sino-Tibetan, Mandarin	Syntactic	Perfective
	Levantine Arabic	Afro-Asiatic, Semitic	Syntactic	Perfective
	Bislama	English Creole (Pacific)	Syntactic	Perfective
	Vietnamese	Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer	Syntactic	Perfective

^aData for each language were collected via sessions/discussions with at least one native speaker. I thank my informants for their help. ^bFor an overview of different aspectual systems, see Dahl (1985).

In Persian, the basic perfective form in (6) can be imperfectivized via the insertion of a durative morpheme mi- (with its past variant mikard in (7)) that undoes the entailment. Dasht in (7) introduces an inference of the engagement in the process of proving; it can usually be left out in the progressive variants, but it is preferred with incremental verbs like ‘prove’. Dasht cannot be used in (6).

(6)

Persian
Anna	sabet	kard	ke	Max	dozd	e.
Anna	prove	pst	that	Max	thief	is
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(7)

Persian
Anna	dasht	sabet	mikard	ke	Max	dozd	e.
Anna	had	prove	dur.pst	that	Max	thief	is
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ↛ Max is a thief.

The pattern remains the same when the imperfective variant of ‘prove’ arises at the syntactic level (via the insertion of freely occurring elements or using periphrastic constructions instead of affixation). In Bislama (see also Meyerhoff 2013), imperfectivization can be expressed by the addition of the progressive morpheme stap as in (9) versus (8).

(8)

Bislama
Anna	i	pruvum	se	Max	hem	i	wan	stilman.
Anna	pm	proved	that	Max	he	pm	a	thief
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(9)

Bislama
Anna	i	stap	pruvum	se	Max	hem	i	wan	stilman.
Anna	pm	prog	proved	that	Max	he	pm	a	thief
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ↛ Max is a thief.

In Vietnamese (see also Nguyen 1997), the progressive morpheme đang is used, as in (11) compared to (10).

(10)

Vietnamese
Anna	chứng minh	[là	Max	ăn trộm].
Anna	prove	that	Max	steal
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(11)

Vietnamese
Anna	đang	chứng minh	[là	Max	ăn trộm].
Anna	prog	prove	that	Max	steal
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ↛ Max is a thief.

Hebrew, Levantine Arabic, Turkish, and Hungarian encode imperfective ‘prove’ through periphrastic constructions. Whereas Hebrew makes use of ‘go to prove’, as in (13) verus (12), Levantine Arabic, Turkish, and Hungarian prefer ‘try to prove’; see (15) verus (14), (17) verus (16), and (19) verus (18), respectively (for Hungarian, see also Zuchewicz 2020).

(12)

Hebrew
Anna	hoxixa	she-Max	ganav.
Anna	proved	that-Max	thief
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(13)

Hebrew
Anna	halxa	le-hoxix	she-Max	ganav.
Anna	went	to-prove	that-Max	thief
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ↛ Max is a thief.

(14)

Levantine Arabic
Anna	athbatat	bano	Max	haramie.
Anna	proved	that	Max	thief
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(15)

Levantine Arabic
Anna	kanat	am thaol	tethbat	ano	Max	haramie.
Anna	was	trying	prove	that	Max	thief
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ↛ Max is a thief.

(16)

Turkish
Max,	Anna’nın	hırsız	olduğunu	kanıtladı.
Max	Anna	thief	that.she.is.it	prove.pst.3sg
‘Max has proved that Anna is a thief.’ → Anna is a thief.

(17)

Turkish
Max,	Anna’nın	hırsız	olduğunu	kanıtlamaya	çalışıyordu.
Max	Anna	thief	that.she.is.it	prove.nmlz	was.trying.to
‘Max was proving that Anna is a thief.’ ↛ Anna is a thief.

(18)

Hungarian
Anna	bebizonyította,	hogy	Max	tolvaj.
Anna	proved	that	Max	steal
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(19)

Hungarian
Anna	próbálta	bebizonyítani,	hogy	Max	tolvaj.
Anna	tried	prove	that	Max	steal
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ↛ Max is a thief.

Interesting results can be found in Tamil, where both the perfective and the imperfective variant might be veridical. The imperfective derivative receives a progressive interpretation, but, according to Sandhya Sundaresan (pers. comm.), it is not quite clear whether truth entailment is canceled here or not. Maintenance of entailment may relate to the nominalization of ‘Max being a thief’. The nominalization suggests that the property of Max being a thief holds here and now, independently of the completion or the ongoingness of the proving process.

(20)

Tamil
Anna	[Max	orə	tiruɖan-gir.adæ]	niruub-itt-aaɭ.
Anna	Max	a	thief-prs.nmlz	prove-pst-3f.sg
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(21)

Tamil
Anna	[Max	orə	tiruɖan-gir.adæ]	niruub-ittə-koηɖirə-nd-aaɭ.
Anna	Max	a	thief-prs.nmlz	prove-asp-prog-pst-3f.sg
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ?→ Max is a thief.

Also in Mandarin Chinese, the progressive morpheme still at least implies that a that-sentence holds true, which highlights the prominence of the veridical meaning of ‘prove’ even more.^[6]

(22)

Mandarin
Anna	zhengming	le	Max	shi	ge	zei.
Anna	prove	pfv	Max	cop	cl	thief
‘Anna has proved that Max is a thief.’ → Max is a thief.

(23)

Mandarin
Anna	zai	zhengming	Max	shi	ge	zei.
Anna	prog	prove	Max	cop	cl	thief
‘Anna was proving that Max is a thief.’ ?→ Max is a thief.

In this section, I introduced typological homogeneity as a new criterion for the establishment of a correlation between the structurally basic aspect of a verbal concept and the more natural aspectual meaning of that same concept. By using the example of verbs of evidence collection, I showed that the basic aspect of ‘prove’ gives rise to the perfective meaning in all investigated languages except Mandarin. The perfective meaning of ‘prove’ is parametrized as veridicality in all languages, which was verified via the systematic inconsistency of perfective clause-embedding sentences with inferences stating that no entailment is detectable. I provided evidence from Slavic languages and Persian, where the imperfective meaning of ‘prove’ comes along via morphologically more complex imperfectivization. I further analyzed languages in which the imperfective meaning of ‘prove’ is expressible via the insertion of an additional durative or progressive exponent, that is, at the syntactic level. These languages include Bislama and Vietnamese. In comparison, Hebrew, Levantine Arabic, Turkish, and Hungarian also encode imperfective meaning of ‘prove’ syntactically, but by means of periphrastic constructions like ‘go/try to prove’. In Tamil and Mandarin, ‘prove’ seems to maintain its veridical meaning even after the addition of a progressive exponent: a morphological one in the former case and a syntactic one in the latter.

2.3 Typological homogeneity in the aspectual representation with other concepts: manner-of-speaking and speech act verbs

In this section, I will briefly discuss the crosslinguistic form-meaning correspondence of aspect with manner-of-speaking verbs (Zwicky 1971) and speech act verbs (Austin 1962), using the example of ‘yell’ and ‘convince’, respectively. The event-structural properties of these verbs differ from those of reveal-type predicates. In contrast to reveal-type predicates, the verbal situations that manner-of-speaking verbs refer to do not need to achieve any specific result to be fulfilled; the role of manner-of-speaking verbs is to verbalize the how, the manner – a concept that, per se, is not based on temporal delimitation.

In contrast, ‘convince’ as a speech act verb relates to the process of making someone believe something, that is, of changing someone’s belief state. The question arises as to whether the realization of the perlocutionary act (with the hearer having their mind changed) tends to be an inherent component of the aspectual representation of ‘convince’ across languages or whether it is the complete attempt to convince without the instantiated perlocution. It also needs to be established whether there is a one-to-one relationship between perlocution and perfectivity.

I begin with manner-of-speaking verbs. In Slavic languages, they have imperfective meaning and can receive a perfective interpretation through affixation (Polish wy-szeptać ‘whisper’, wy-mamrotać, wy-/za-mruczeć ‘mutter’, wy-krzyczeć ‘yell’; Czech za-šeptat ‘whisper’, za-mumlat ‘mutter’, za-křičet ‘yell’). Imperfective bases further occur in Russian, as seen in (24)–(25), Croatian, as in (26)–(27), Serbian, and Slovene, as well as in Mandarin, as seen in (28)–(29), and Vietnamese, as in (30)–(32). This is the reverse case compared to reveal-type predicates, where the optional imperfectivization operation was conducted on a base with perfective meaning. This indicates that manner-of-speaking verbs are primarily imperfective, which corresponds to their event-structural properties and justifies the concept-based approach to aspect.

(24)

Russian
Jan	kričal,	čto	Marek	–	vor.
Jan	shouted.ipfv	that	Marek		thief
‘Jan shouted/was shouting that Marek was a thief.’

(25)

Russian
Jan	pro-kričal,	čto	Marek	–	vor.
Jan	pfv-shouted	that	Marek		thief
‘Jan shouted/has shouted out that Marek was a thief.’

(26)

Croatian
Jan	je	vika-o	da	je	Marek	lopov.
Jan	is	shout.ipfv-pst.ptcp	comp	is	Marek	thief
‘Jan shouted/was shouting that Marek was a thief.’

(27)

Croatian
Jan	je	vik-nu-o	da	je	Marek	lopov.
Jan	is	shout-pfv-pst.ptcp	comp	is	Marek	thief
‘Jan has shouted out that Marek was a thief.’

In line with Sun (2022), I assume that bare forms in Mandarin contain a weak covert imperfective. They express typical imperfective readings: a habitual, a continuous (a particular state holds true), or a progressive reading (a single event is ongoing). The progressive can also be marked overtly via the particle zai. Interestingly, the perfectivizing of manner-of-speaking verbs seems odd. This might be due to the preferred not-at-issueness of the aspectual information of manner-of-speaking verbs (Ruoying Zhao, pers. comm.; Sun 2022) and, in this connection, to the relationship between le and veridicality.

(28)

Mandarin
Jan	shuo	/	?han	Marek	shi	ge	zei.
Jan	say^[7]	/	shout	Marek	cop	cl	thief
‘Jan says/said / shouts/shouted that Marek was a thief.’

(29)

Mandarin
Jan	zai	han	Marek	shi	ge	zei.
Jan	prog	shout	Marek	cop	cl	thief
‘Jan was shouting that Marek was a thief.’

Vietnamese patterns with Mandarin, but it additionally allows both the optional progressive (via the particle đang), as in (31), and the optional perfective ‘shout out’ interpretation (via the particle đã), as in (32).

(30)

Vietnamese
Jan	gào lên	rằng	Marek	là	đồ trộm cắp.
Jan	shout	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan shouts/shouted that Marek was a thief.’

(31)

Vietnamese
Jan	đang	gào lên	rằng	Marek	là	đồ trộm cắp.
Jan	prog	shout	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan was shouting that Marek was a thief.’

(32)

Vietnamese
Jan	đã	gào lên	rằng	Marek	là	đồ trộm cắp.
Jan	pfv	shout	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan has shouted out that Marek was a thief.’

Now I will move on to ‘convince’. The basic (structurally simpler) aspect of ‘convince’ implies the instantiation of the perlocutionary act – that is, the acknowledgment of a proposition as true by the hearer – in most of the investigated languages. In Slavic languages, it is the perfective base that comes with an entailment of the proposition being taken for granted by the addressee. The imperfective counterpart, derived from the perfective through suffixation, is neutral concerning the realization of the perlocutionary act. The way in which morphological complexity interacts with semantic interpretation in Slavic can be seen in (33) and (34) for Slovene and (35) and (36) for Polish.

(33)

Slovene
Jan	je	prepričal	Ano,	da	je	Marko	tat.
Jan	aux	convince.pst.pfv	Ana.acc	that	is	Marko	thief
‘Jan has convinced Ana that Marko is a thief.’ → Ana believes that Marko is a thief.

(34)

Slovene
Jan	je	preprič-eva-l	Ano,	da	je	Marko	tat.
Jan	aux	convince-ipfv-pst	Ana.acc	that	is	Marko	thief
‘Jan was convincing Ana that Marko is a thief’ or ‘Jan has made several attempts to convince Ana that Marko is a thief.’

(35)

Polish
Jan	przekonał	Anię,	że	Marek	jest	złodziejem.
Jan	convince.pst.pfv	Ania.acc	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan has convinced Ania that Marek is a thief.’ → Ania believes that Marek is a thief.

(36)

Polish
Jan	przekon-ywa-ł	Anię,	że	Marek	jest	złodziejem.
Jan	convince-ipfv-pst	Ania.acc	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan was convincing Ania that Marek is a thief’ or ‘Jan has made several attempts to convince Ania that Marek is a thief.’

An interesting pattern occurs in Mandarin Chinese. For ‘convince’ to be able to embed a proposition, a resultative verbal compound ‘make someone believe something’ needs to be used (Ruoying Zhao, pers. comm.), with an optional insertion of the perfective particle le. Both with and without le, the perlocutionary effect remains in force. This suggests that speech act verbs that relate to perlocutionary acts tend to include the realization of the perlocution in their basic representation. This can (Slavic languages), but does not have to (Mandarin Chinese), correlate with perfectivity. The Mandarin example (37) with le (the perfective variant) seems to emphasize Ania’s change of belief (change of state as a typical semantic contribution of perfectivity); without le (the imperfective variant), the emphasis is on the content of the belief (Marek being a thief).

(37)

Mandarin
Jan	rang	Ania	xiangxin	(le)	Marek	shi	ge	zei.
Jan	let	Ania	believe	pfv	Marek	cop	cl	thief
‘Jan made Ania believe that Marek is a thief’ → Ania believes that Marek is a thief.

In Vietnamese, the basic aspect of ‘convince’ translates to a finished attempt to convince, as seen in (38). The realization of the perlocution requires the presence of a particle and a circumstantial ‘can’, as in (39). The progressive non-perlocutionary variant needs a progressive marker, as in (40).^[8]

(38)

Vietnamese
Jan	thuyết phục	Ania	rằng	Marek	là	đồ trộm cắp.
Jan	convince	Ania	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan has attempted to convince Ania that Marek is a thief.’

(39)

Vietnamese
Jan	đã	thuyết phục	được	Ania	rằng	Marek	là	đồ trộm cắp.
Jan	pfv	convince	can	Ania	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan has convinced Ania that Marek is a thief.’ → Ania believes that Marek is a thief.

(40)

Vietnamese
(Lúc đó)	Jan	đang	thuyết phục	Ania	rằng	Marek	là	đồ trộm cắp.
(at that moment)	Jan	prog	convince	Ania	that	Marek	is	thief
‘Jan was convincing Ania that Marek is a thief.’

3 Summary and outlook

The goal of this paper was to show that aspect can tell us something about the conceptualization of verbal events. More precisely, I have shown that basic structural aspect marking, both morphological in the case of Slavic languages and Persian and syntactic in a broader context, correlates with a conceptually more natural aspectual meaning of a verbal concept. Following this line of reasoning, I have built upon ideas presented by Lehmann (1993) and Becker and Malchukov (2022). I have focused on the concepts of proving, revealing, and showing by subsuming them under “verbs of evidence collection” (reveal-type predicates; Zuchewicz 2020). I have introduced a new criterion that establishes whether the aspectual category of a particular verbal concept counts as conceptually more natural: typological homogeneity. I have shown that the basic aspect of verbs of evidence collection gives rise to the interpretation of an incremental veridical change. A reverse pattern has been observed for manner-of-speaking verbs, where the basic aspect comes with an imperfective non-veridical interpretation. In the case of ‘convince’, the basic aspect mostly translates to the incremental veridical creation of an argument, with veridicality being an effect of the acknowledgment of a proposition as true by the hearer. I have demonstrated that there exists a one-to-one correlation between structure and semantics when it comes to the aspectual representation of verbal concepts: a structurally less complex representation indicates a more natural interpretation. I have further shown that (im)perfective meanings do not necessarily need (im)perfective exponents, in line with Klimek-Jankowska and Błaszczak (2022), Mueller-Reichau (in press), Tatevosov (2011), Grzegorczykowa (1997), Willim (2006), and Bogusławski (1963), among many others.

Corresponding author: Karolina Zuchewicz, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, E-mail: karolina.zuchewicz@uni-leipzig.de

Acknowledgments

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I thank Daniel Duncan for his support during the editorial process. I thank all my informants for the data and fruitful discussions. I thank Carol Aru, Petr Biskup, Ana Krajinović, Petra Mišmaš, Fereshteh Modarresi, Ahmad Oudeh, Burak Özmen, Daria Seres, Olga Steriopolo, Sandhya Sundaresan, Radek Šimík, Lilla Szabó, Tue Trinh, and Ruoying Zhao. I thank Martin Haspelmath and Olav Mueller-Reichau.

References

Anstatt, Tanja. 2003. Aspekt, Argumente und Verbklassen im Russischen. Tübingen: Universität Tübingen habilitation thesis.Search in Google Scholar

Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Becker, Laura. 2018. Aspectuality in Hungarian, German, and Slavic: A parallel corpus study. In Eric Fuß, Marek Konopka, Beata Trawinski & Ulrich H. Waßner (eds.), Grammar and corpora 2016, 183–207. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing.Search in Google Scholar

Becker, Laura & Andrej L. Malchukov. 2022. Semantic maps and typological hierarchies: Evidence for the actionality hierarchy. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41(1). 31–66. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2021-2044.Search in Google Scholar

Bogusławski, Andrzej. 1963. Czasowniki dokonane i niedokonane i ich stosunki wzajemne [Perfective and imperfective verbs and the interactions between them]. In Witold Doroszewski (ed.), Z polskich studiów slawistycznych [From Polish Slavic studies], Seria 2: Językoznawstwo, 153–159. Warsaw: Polska Akademia Nauk.Search in Google Scholar

Bohnemeyer, Jürgen & Mary Swift. 2004. Event realization and default aspect. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3). 263–296. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:ling.0000023371.15460.43.10.1023/B:LING.0000023371.15460.43Search in Google Scholar

Breu, Walter. 1994. Interactions between lexical, temporal and aspectual meanings. Studies in Language 18(1). 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18.1.03bre.Search in Google Scholar

Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.9Search in Google Scholar

Croft, William. 2012. Verbs: Aspect and causal structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248582.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar

Dahl, Östen & Viveka Velupillai. 2013. Perfective/imperfective aspect. In Matthew, S. & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), WALS online (version 2020.3) [Dataset]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Zenodo. https://wals.info/chapter/65 (accessed 23 March 2023).Search in Google Scholar

Egré, Paul. 2008. Question-embedding and factivity. Grazer Philosophische Studien 77(1). 85–125. https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-90000845.Search in Google Scholar

Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud. 1990. Ikonismus versus Ökonomieprinzip: Am Beispiel russischer Aspekt-und Kasusbildungen. Papiere zur Linguistik 40. 46–69.Search in Google Scholar

Grzegorczykowa, Renata. 1997. Nowe spojrzenie na kategorię aspektu w perspektywie semantyki kognitywnej [A new perspective on the category of aspect from the point of view of cognitive semantics]. In Renata Grzegorczykowa & Zofia Zaron (eds.), Semantyczna struktura słownictwa i wypowiedzi [Semantic structure of vocabulary and utterances], 25–38. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.Search in Google Scholar

Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 42(1). 25–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022226705003683.Search in Google Scholar

Jakobson, Roman. 1939. Signe zero. In Selected writings, vol. 2, 211–219. The Hague: Mouton.Search in Google Scholar

Jakobson, Roman. 1957. Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb. In Selected writings, vol. 2, 130–148. The Hague: Mouton.Search in Google Scholar

Klimek, Dorota. 2005. Contingency relations and markedness of aspectual viewpoints in English and Polish. In UiL OTS Yearbook 2005. Utrecht: Institute of Linguistics OTS.Search in Google Scholar

Klimek-Jankowska, Dorota & Joanna Błaszczak. 2022. The status of secondary imperfectivization in Polish: Evidence from VP idioms. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 30(FASL 29 extra issue). 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsl.2022.a923068.Search in Google Scholar

Krifka, Manfred. 1989. Nominal reference, temporal constitution and quantification in event semantics. In Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem & Peter van Emde Boas (eds.), Semantics and contextual expression, 75–115. Dordrecht: Foris.10.1515/9783110877335-005Search in Google Scholar

Krifka, Manfred. 1992. Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal constitution. In Ivan A. Sag & Anna Szabolcsi (eds.), Lexical matters, 29–53. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Search in Google Scholar

Lehmann, Volkmar. 1993. Die russischen Aspekte als gestufte Kategorien: Ein Beispiel für die Bedeutung der kognitiven Linguistik in der slavistischen Sprachwissenschaft. Die Welt der Slaven 38. 265–297.Search in Google Scholar

Levshina, Natalia. 2016. Verbs of letting in Germanic and Romance: A quantitative investigation based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles. Languages in Contrast 16(1). 84–117. https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.16.1.04lev.Search in Google Scholar

Malchukov, Andrej L. 2019. Interaction of verbal categories in a typological perspective. Gengo Kenkyu 156. 1–24.Search in Google Scholar

Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2013. Bislama structure dataset. In Susanne M. Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath & Magnus Huber (eds.), Atlas of Pidgin and Creole language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://apics-online.info/contributions/23 (accessed 24 March 2023).Search in Google Scholar

Młynarczyk, Anna K. 2004. Aspectual pairing in Polish (LOT Dissertation Series 87). Utrecht: LOT.Search in Google Scholar

Mueller-Reichau, Olav. In press. The morphosemantics of Russian aspect. In Berit Gehrke & Radek Šimík (eds.), Topics in the semantics of Slavic languages. Berlin: Language Science Press.Search in Google Scholar

Nguyen, Dinh-Hoa. 1997. Vietnamese (London Oriental and African Language Library 9). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/loall.9Search in Google Scholar

Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 2002. Recent activity in the theory of aspect: Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state? Linguistic Typology 6(2). 199–271. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2002.007.Search in Google Scholar

Sun, Hongyuan. 2014. Temporal construals of bare predicates in Mandarin Chinese (LOT Dissertation Series 373). Utrecht: LOT.Search in Google Scholar

Sun, Yenan. 2022. Incompleteness under discussion. Chicago: University of Chicago doctoral dissertation.Search in Google Scholar

Tatevosov, Sergei. 2011. Severing perfectivity from the verb. Scando-Slavica 57. 216–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/00806765.2011.631782.Search in Google Scholar

Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review 66(2). 143–160. https://doi.org/10.2307/2182371.Search in Google Scholar

Wiland, Bartosz. 2012. Prefix stacking, syncretism, and the syntactic hierarchy. In Markéta Ziková & Mojmír Docekal (eds.), Slavic languages in formal grammar: Proceedings of FDSL 8.5, Brno 2010, 307–324. Berlin: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar

Willim, Ewa. 2006. Event, individuation and countability: A study with special reference to English and Polish. Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Zinova, Julia. 2021. Russian verbal prefixation (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax 7). Berlin: Language Science Press.Search in Google Scholar

Zuchewicz, Karolina. 2020. On the veridicality of perfective clause-embedding verbs in Polish: A unified aspect-based analysis of incremental theme verbs with nominal and propositional complements. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin dissertation.Search in Google Scholar

Zwicky, Arnold A. 1971. In a manner of speaking. Linguistic Inquiry 2(2). 223–233.Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2024-04-17

Accepted: 2024-09-09

Published Online: 2024-10-22

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0072

Keywords for this article

aspect; language comparison; morpho-semantics

Creative Commons

BY 4.0