Scientific theory of aspect - To Rolf

Kimmo Huovila kimmo at kaamas.kielikone.fi
Tue Dec 26 06:03:08 EST 2000


Rolf Furuli wrote:

> Intuition (assumption) 4. Language is in principle not different from
> natural phenomena which are studied by the natural sciences. The smaller
> the part is that we are studying, the more certain are our conclusions. The
> minimal pair-situation where there are just two possibilities is the ideal
> situation. The certainty of our conclusions decreases propotionally with
> the number of elements that we have to explain at the same time.

> Based on 4): The unit of study must be the "word" (this term is ambiguous
> but at this stage it is useful) and how it functions in its clause. Studies
> of units above the word/clause-level (such as discourse analysis) is
> meaningful for other purposes but is not meaningful in an attempt to find
> the meaning of aspect.

I doubt that studying discourse is irrelevant for trying to find the
meaning of aspect. This view of yours seems to assume a quite strict
dichotomy between semantics and pragmatics. What I mean is that to
analyze whether a feature is even aspectual, we need to see how
fitting the aspectual meaning would be in that context, not only on a
sentence level. If we neglect the discourse level, we may end up in a
system where we have two components of semantics and pragmatics that
are too unrelated to be realistic. Semantics should not be done in a
vacuum, isolated from pragmatics. Furthermore, part of aspectual meaning
is its discourse function.

Kimmo Huovila



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