Abstract
Verkuyl’s (1972) understanding of aspect, if properly studied and interpreted, supplies ample opportunities for a conclusion to be reached that the article in languages like Dutch and English has a lot to do with the mechanism for explicating aspect distinctions. For some unclear reason, however, the author abstained from giving this problem proper consideration in his first book. Nor did he remedy the situation in the extended theory (Verkuyl 1993). What is more, the thesis that the article is a marker of ‘specified quantity’, bearing an extremely strong heuristic potential, constitutes a single minor statement in the original version of the theory:
“[the category] SPECIFIED is provisionally located in the Determiner”
(Verkuyl 1972: 59).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cf. in connection with this the discussion of quantity in Harlig (1983).
The same is also true of the Bulgarian equivalents. Cf. the possible aspectual readings of the English sentences and the way these should be rendered in Bulgarian — it is not clear whether the imperfective Imperfect or the perfective Aorist would be more appropriate, though both aspectual forms are possible in the translation equivalents: (55) a. Women knitted a Norwegian sweater ‘Ženi ?pletjahaimpfvImp/?izpletohapfvAor edin norvežki pulover’ b. Men ate a herring ‘Mǎ že ?jadjahaimpfvImp/?izjadohapfvAor edna heringa’
It is true a sentence like Mechanics repaired the car is not at all unnatural in its perfective reading. This point was made by an anonymous reviewer, as well as by other people in personal communication. Therefore, it is probably worth emphasizing the following again. First, it is just a general tendency for sentences with a bare plural like those in (58) to be read imperfectively, not that they are to be regarded as always imperfective. Second, in spite of this tendency, probably all sentences of this kind could be perfective in actual discourse, depending on a very large number of factors: type of quantification of NP constituents, the lexical semantics of nouns and verbs used, the semantic effects of combining words together, and, first of all, context. Third, vice versa, all perfective sentences can be read imperfectively (an already trivial observation in aspectology). Fourth, as will be shown in Chapter 14, ‘knowledge of the world’, an additional factor, plays a specific role in determining the aspect of many types of sentences, overriding other rules.
ta is a postpositioned definite article.
ta is a postpositioned definite article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kabakčiev, K. (2000). The Article and the Related Markers of Quantity in the Expression of Aspect in English. In: Aspect in English. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9355-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9355-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5548-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9355-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive