[B-Greek] Aspect vs. Aktionsart - Semantic Distinction, need linguist's help
Michael Aubrey
mga318 at yahoo.com
Sun May 22 00:56:55 EDT 2011
Hi Eddie,
There's not much context here for following exactly what the author is talking about. Depending on the wider context it might not be possible to provide Greek examples. It sounds like we're talking about Slavic aspect, which is quite different than what we have in Greek. We're talking about drastically different verbal systems. This last bit sounds a whole lot like Russian (or some other Slavic language) and very little like Greek:
"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."
If that's correct that this is talking specifically about aspect in a Slavic language, I could probably give you some examples from Russian off-list, but the connection to Greek is somewhat limited. closest Greek parallel you could find would involve Greek verbs and their derivatives with pre-verbs (e.g. ερχομαι and εισερχομαι) which would be the "aktionsartal variant" with changes the lexical semantics of the verb while a pair like (ερχομαι and ηλθον) would be the aspectual change. That's the closest one could get, but the Russian (Slavic) system is quite different and that doesn't really capture everything. There is a somewhat parallel discussion in Robertson that comes close to capturing this point with reference to English verbs, but it only deals with Agrell's aktionsart where the change in aspect affects the lexical meaning of the verb.
Quote:
"The point is that often where the simple verb is durative it is rendered “perfective” by the preposition in composition. This peculiarity is common to all the Indo-[European] tongues and reaches its highest development in the Germanic (cf. English and German) and the Balto-Slavic languages. Thus, we in English say bring and bring up, burn and burn up, carry and carry off, come and come on, drive and drive away…. The ‘imperfective’ simplex becomes ‘perfective’ in the compound" (Robertson, 1919: 826).
And here's an MA thesis that deals with the subject: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1238085936
Mike Aubrey
ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ: Studies in Greek language and linguistics
http://evepheso.wordpress.com
________________________________
From: Eddie Mishoe <edmishoe at yahoo.com>
To: B Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2011 7:53 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] Aspect vs. Aktionsart - Semantic Distinction, need linguist's help
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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