Aspect in English: A “Common-Sense” View of the Interplay between Verbal and Nominal Referents

359 Pages·2000·6.938 MB·English

by  Krasimir Kabakčiev (auth.)

ASPECT IN ENGLISH
Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy
Volume 75
Managing Editors
GENNARO CHIERCHIA, University of Milan
PAULINE JACOBSON, Brown University
FRANCIS J. PELLETIER, University ofA lberta
Editorial Board
JOHAN VAN BENTHEM, University ofA msterdam
GREGORY N. CARLSON, University of Rochester
DAVID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Columbus
GERALD GAZDAR, University of Sussex, Brighton
IRENE HElM, M.I. T., Cambridge
EWAN KLEIN, University of Edinburgh
BILL LADUSAW, University of California at Santa Cruz
TERRENCE PARSONS, University of California, Irvine
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
ASPECT IN ENGLISH
A "Common-Sense" View of the Interplay
between Verbal and Nominal Referents
by
Krasimir Kabakciev
Institute for the Bulgarian Language,
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,
Sofia, Bulgaria
....
"
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5548-4 ISBN 978-94-015-9355-7 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-94-015-9355-7
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
To my wife Valentina and my son Alexander
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface IX
Acknowledgements XI
Introduction xiii
Chapter 1. On the essence of aspect
Chapter 2. Vendler's classification of situations, and the problem
of its interpretation 31
Chapter 3. Verkuyl's theory of compositional aspect 55
Chapter 4. The article and the related markers of quantity
in the expression of aspect in English 69
Chapter 5. Extension in time of subjects and objects from a
"common-sense" point of view 91
Chapter 6. The mechanism for mapping the temporal values of
subjects and objects 123
Chapter 7. The interdependence between markers of bounded ness
in verbs and in nouns 153
Chapter 8. The Progressive in English 163
Chapter 9. Lexical meanings of verbs, and aspect in English 181
Chapter 10. Meanings of nouns and noun phrases, and aspect in
English 211
Chapter 11. The impact of adverbials in the sentence, and aspect in
English 241
Chapter 12. On negativity and the explication of perfectivity 263
Chapter 13. On aspectual classes in English 279
Chapter 14. On 'knowledge of the world' in the explication of
aspect in English 309
Conclusion 327
Appendix. The major characteristics of the Bulgarian tense-aspect
system 329
References 333
Index of terms 339
Index of authors 347
vii
PREFACE
This book is based on a monograph published in Bulgarian, Vidiit v ang/ijskija ezik.
Za bii/garite, razbirasti (i obicasti) tozi ezik [Aspect in English. For Bulgarians who
understand (and love) this language], Sofia, 1992: Albo, ISBN 954-8141-01-9. It
offers, however, a fairly enlarged and updated version of the original publication as
well as analyses or results of analyses reported elsewhere (e.g. in Kabakciev 1989;
1993a; 1993b; 1993c; 1996). Recent years have seen an explosion of investigations
on aspect both as a cross-linguistic category and as a structural or semantic fact of
the English language. This book represents, among other things, an attempt to over
view some of the development of aspectology based mainly on data from Modern
Standard English. Naturally, apart from the translation, updating and revising that
had to be done, this edition also differs from the original in other ways - to suit the
specificity of a new audience. However, it purposefully follows the original in the
attempt to employ an explanatory style rid of bizarre phraseology or cumbersome
formalism. Special phraseology and different formal analyses, as will become clear
later on in the book, may be nice tools for the study of language but often raise
obstacles to acquiring a better understanding of certain phenomena.
Another difference from the previous edition results in a reduction of some of the
specific comparisons between English and Bulgarian that were essential for the
original audience. However, not all of the comparisons between these two languages
(or, more generally, between languages of the Germanic and the Slavic type) have
been removed, and some have even been dealt with in greater detail. Although
translation from one language into another is often snubbed at as a poor tool for
analysing the semantics of sentences, it will be seen that in some cases, contrasting
translation equivalents can serve as a good expedient for uncovering certain readings
of sentences in a given language that otherwise remain hidden for the investigator. In
an account of English that is not strictly formalised it is usually the English language
itself that serves as the metalanguage of the semantic description. But in this case
Bulgarian, being a Slavic language, will often prove to be a better metalanguage for
the study of aspect, and for a long time in linguistics Slavic languages were con
sidered the aspectuallanguages par excellence. Furthermore, it will be shown that an
adequate conception of aspect in English is, in fact, difficult to obtain without a prior
understanding of the way the two major aspectual systems, the compositional one
(as, e.g., in English) and the verbal one (as, e.g., in Bulgarian), transverse natural
languages. Other changes in this English version of the book include a number of
detailed analyses of some recent advances in aspectology, and the addition of two
new chapters, entitled On negativity and the explication of perfectivity and On
aspectual classes in English.
IX
PREFACE
GENERAL CONTENTS OF THE BOOK, GUIDELINES TO READING
Leaving aside the cognitive basis of aspect and the dependence of the explication of
aspectual values on knowledge of the world, from the point of view of mainstream
linguistics it can be argued that this book offers a comprehensive grammatical and
semantic description of the phenomenon studied. Or, perhaps, that it offers an
amalgamation of ideas belonging to separate linguistic spheres, identified as, for
example, lexicology, morphology, and syntax, into a unified grammatical and
semantic framework. This statement is valid also in the sense that the separate
chapters of the book can hardly be viewed as a possible reference guide to check the
aspectual or other similar values of particular words, of sentences or of other
structural language entities. The outlines of the overall system of aspect in English,
seen mainly as a complex and subtle interplay between verbal and nominal referents,
are progressively revealed and the phenomena belonging to the system are surveyed
in terms of their interrelationships. The indices at the end of the book offer
guidelines with respect to problems that can arise and are meant to facilitate their
solution. However, it seems reasonable to advise that if the potential reader is to get
an adequate understanding of the complex nature of aspect, it is recommended to
read the book from the beginning to the end - possibly omitting passages containing
familiar information. It may be also helpful to remember that many of the examples
introduced initially are then repeatedly used elsewhere with their original numbering.
The idea of putting together a monograph of this kind dates back a long time.
Several articles on the problems dealt with in this edition have been published in
either Bulgarian or English (publications in English are Kabakciev 1984a; 1984b;
1989; 1993a; 1993b; 1993c; 1996). The book is primarily designed for researchers
of aspect and related problems (tense, temporality, verbal and nominal reference) but
it can also be useful for a broader audience, including students of English at an
advanced level of prior acquisition. Thus, while generally the aim of the present
work is to offer a theory of aspect in English (and hence in similar languages)
oriented towards specialists (aspectologists, theoretical and applied linguists,
grammarians, semanticists, psycholinguists, logicians, philosophers of language),
other readers to whom the specificity of the English language is appealing from a
larger scientific or cultural perspective could also find it worth investigating.
x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Gerald Mayer from Fordham University, New York, Jim Miller
and Sheila Glasbey from the University of Edinburgh who kindly gave me their
native speakers' interpretations of many English examples construed or modified by
me. I thank all the colleagues from the universities of Uppsala, Stockholm, Lund,
Gothenburg, Helsinki and Oslo who attended my lectures and expressed interest in
the general theory of aspect presented in this book. Among them it was Sven
Gustavsson who initiated the idea for my lecture tours in the Scandinavian countries
(in 1987 and 1990), and Osten Dahl, Thore Pettersson, Arne Hult, Jouko Lindstedt,
Kjetil Ra Hauge, Roger Jullin, Gunilla and Ivan Fredriksson, Jordan Zlatkov,
Birgitta and Minko Dimitrov turned them into a pleasant and fruitful experience. But
most of all I am indebted to Boris Ivanov from Uppsala University, now a respected
novelist and poet both in Sweden and in Bulgaria, who was tragically deprived of his
country, his family and friends for three decades: for his perpetual hospitality during
my stay in Scandinavia, for his remarkable literary and poetic insights, and for an
example of how one can survive under fierce political and moral oppression. A re
search stay at the Max Planck Institute for Psycho linguistics in Nijmegen in 1990
organised by Wolfgang Klein is also gratefully appreciated.
I would like to thank Henk Verkuyl: for the discussions we had on aspect and on
social issues in the wake of the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe; and, more
importantly, on behalf of the aspectological community, for his contribution - the
writing of the book On the Compositional Nature of the Aspects. Viewed as a
cornerstone in the development of aspectology, it takes (along with its 1993 sequel)
a very prominent place in the present work.
The completion of the English version of the book was financially made possible
by the Royal Society of Edinburgh whose 1996 Caledonian Research Foundation
European Visiting Research Fellowship I gratefully acknowledge. The Department
of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, headed by Ronnie Cann,
provided an advanced technological medium and a friendly academic atmosphere
that facilitated the process of updating the original publication. In Edinburgh I also
took part in the Centre for Cognitive Science Tense and Aspect seminar and had
interesting discussions with Sheila Glasbey, Diego Molla-Aliod and Frank Schilder.
It was Jim Miller from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh,
who nominated me for the Royal Society Fellowship and who offered permanent
professional, practical and moral support. To him I am most indebted for the com
pletion of the work. Back in Sofia, John Muirhead, formerly of the Free University in
Berlin, gave me valuable advice on the interpretation of some of the most difficult
examples and polished the text of the manuscript. My thanks go again to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh and to RSE member Ron Asher for enabling me to travel to
Edinburgh to prepare the final draft of the book.
xi
ACKNO~DGEMENTS
My family's contribution was also significant. Valentina, my wife, took up my
home obligations during my stay in Edinburgh, and Alexander, my son, prepared the
diagrams. I dedicate this book to them.
Finally, since the motivation for doing research is inseparable from the social
conditions underlying it, gratitude is once again expressed, as in the original edition,
to those without whom this book would have, in all probability, remained unwritten:
to those people in Bulgaria who banished an epoch of disgrace to the history books
and enabled the free expression of will and thought.
xii