When (im)perfective is perfect (and when it is not)

  1. Borik, Olga 1
  1. 1 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
    info

    Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02msb5n36

Revista:
Catalan journal of linguistics

ISSN: 1695-6885 2014-9719

Ano de publicación: 2018

Título do exemplar: The perfect issue

Volume: 17

Páxinas: 19-42

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.5565/REV/CATJL.246 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDDD editor

Outras publicacións en: Catalan journal of linguistics

Obxectivos de Desenvolvemento Sustentable

Resumo

The goal of this paper is to discuss some meaning correspondences (and/or clashes) between the perfective/imperfective aspectual contrast in Russian and various interpretations of a perfect in English. While a detailed comparison between perfect and (im)perfective, even in only two specific languages, is a project that clearly extends beyond all imaginable page limits for a single paper, I hope to demonstrate here some tendencies which might facilitate further (and deeper) theoretical and empirical studies of these two highly debated grammatical categories. In particular, the paper will show that there is a clear split between perfective and imperfective aspect in the non-past tense with respect to expressing perfect meanings and there is also a split between different existential meanings of the perfect in the sense that some of them correspond to the perfective aspect and some of them are only rendered by the imperfective aspect in Russian. Given this empirical picture, one of the theoretical questions that emerges from this study is what kind of repercussions the observed generalizations might have for a (universal) grammatical theory of tense and aspect.

Información de financiamento

I am extremely grateful to the editors of this volume, José M. Brucart and Teresa M. Xiqués, both for their kind invitation to participate in this volume and for their endless patience during the whole time that it took to put this volume together. I thank the two reviewers of this paper for their time and effort to read the paper and for their helpful comments. All the remaining errors are of course my own. The research presented in this paper was supported by the Spanish MICINN (grant FFI2014-52015-P).

Financiadores

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