On the Essence of Aspect

Abstract

In his review of Thore Pettersson’s book On Russian Predicates. A Theory of Case and Aspect, almost three decades ago Issatschenko wrote:

“Russian aspects are often considered to be awe-inspiring and mystical categories to be treated only by the initiated, i.e. by the native speaker”

(Issatschenko 1974: 141). This famous quotation applies to Slavic aspect. But the same thesis has been taken to be valid with respect to other languages, including English, and today it can still be generalised that aspect remains a mysterious phenomenon. What aspect in Modern English is from a contemporary point of view can vary greatly from study to study and from linguist to linguist. To the authors of the largest grammar of English, for example (Quirk et al 1985), aspect is represented by the distinctions between progressive and non-progressive and perfect and non-perfect forms of the verb. A large number of other authors subscribe to the same view, or at least a similar one (see Saurer 1984; Brinton 1988; Binnick 1991; Tobin 1993; Hatav 1993; Mellor 1995). To Bartsch (1995), not only the Perfect, the Future is also an aspect! As we shall see later, however, this approach can hardly be said to be prevalent in aspectology and, furthermore, investigations of aspect on a large cross-language scale do not support it at all. Aspect in the model to be advanced in this book, to put it simply at the beginning, has to do first and foremost with completion and non-completion of situations and should by no means be regarded as a morphological (periphrastic) phenomenon restricted to the verb.