[B-Greek] Aspect vs. Aktionsart - Semantic Distinction, need linguist's help

Eddie Mishoe edmishoe at yahoo.com
Sat May 21 22:53:32 EDT 2011


Linguists,

I came across this article on Aspect and Aktionsart by someone within the Slavic school. Can one of you expert linguists give me one or two detailed Greek examples illustrating the following paragraph's assertions, especially the second half:

The notion of aspectual pair needs to be understood in opposition to Aktionsart.
In fact, it is precisely the notion of aspectual pair that the Slavic school uses to delimit what is truly aspectual from the merely Aktionsartal. That is, the Slavic school
approach views the link between perfective and imperfective aspect as being realized by the existence of an aspectual pair. The two members of the pair are viewed as two forms of the same verb, and (a crucial point) they are viewed as having precisely the same lexical meaning. To be sure, there is certainly a semantic distinction between the perfective and non-perfective forms of any verb: this semantic distinction has something to do with a binary opposition concerning the way an event is viewed, such as the opposition between the completeness and incompleteness of an action. Nonetheless, this semantic distinction (which is usually viewed as the only semantic distinction between the two verbs in the pair) is not viewed as lexical — rather, it is the contribution of the aspectual system. Thus the difference between Agrell’s narrow concept of aspect and Aktionsart is captured by saying that changing aspect does not affect lexical meaning of the verb,
 whereas deriving an Aktionsartal variant of a verb does result in a ‘modification’ (though not a complete change) of the verb’s lexical semantics.

OFFLIST replies are welcome.

Eddie Mishoe


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