aspect thread

Norman Goos normangoos at comcast.net
Tue Dec 17 08:43:43 EST 2002


It was recently written:
>"Fully recognising the terminological, as well as paradigmatic minefield I 
>really do have a problem with the not infrequent attempt to describe the 
>aorist forms as "action seen as complete or as a whole". Part of the 
>problem lies that such a description is too easily confused with 
>perfect/perfective (3. in Eric's scheme below). As yet I'm unshaken not 
>only from my Porter-esque notion that the aorist goes not grammaticalise 
>time, but also neither does it actually grammaticalise aspect. If you want 
>to, you could describe it as 0-aspect ("Null-aspect"). Hence the parallel 
>I tried to bring out in my original "teaching aspect via english" between 
>greek aorist and english simple forms. The aorist is literally 
>"undefined", not only with respect to time (so Aristotle), but also aspect."

I understand that you are claiming that the time is a sole result of 
markers (Porter & Decker contra Fanning & Wallace), not morphology, but 
what are you suggesting points to the aspectal notion?


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