Re: "Anticipatory" Tense

> Date:         Sat, 2 Mar 2002 12:46:18 +0000
> From: Tim May <butsuri@...>
>
> Ian Maxwell writes:
> >[...] I decided to add, in addition to the perfect and imperfect
> >verb forms, an "anticipatory" form--for example, the first person
> >past anticipatory of "to go" would be "I was about to go", [...]
>
> I believe that would be the prospective aspect.  See
> http://www.invisiblelighthouse.com/langlab/aspect.html
> under the heading "Perfect (retrospective) and progressive".
> I learned everything I know about aspect from that document, so if
> it's wrong, so am I.
I looked the terms up in Trask 93(*), and he concurs with Harrison.
(Except for the suggestion to replace perfect with retrospective).

> I was going to say that perfect, imperfect and progressive are aspects
> rather than tenses (as they've been referred to in most replies to
> this) but the abovelinked notes that this classification is not
> unanimously accepted.
Well, some linguists may not think that perfect is an aspect as such,
but they don't see it as a tense either. It's one pole of a static/
active axis: Perfect is used to focus on a state that results from an
earlier action, and its unnamed opposite (non-perfect) by default
focusses on the action itself.

The point is, I think, that the perfect/non-perfect distinction can be
independent of other aspectual distinctions: he stops playing every
day at four (which I notice) vs. he's stopped playing every day when I
get home at four (so I notice the silence) --- here there's both a
cessative aspect expressed by stop, a habitual aspect expressed by
every day, and a non-perfect/perfect distinction.

According to Trask, prospective denotes the state of being about to do
something, not the immediacy of the actual act --- the crown prince is
going to become king, some time the next thirty years --- and it thus
shares the stative status of perfect, and presumably its aspecthood.

(I think Welsh and Irish express the perfect by something like 'is
after', and the prospective by 'is before', clearly marking them as
states).

NOTE: It's important to distinguish the common names of verb forms,
which can be rather unsystematic, from the tenses and aspects they
express. The English verb form called the perfect for short is
properly the present perfect, and can be past or present, perfective
or not, perfect or not, according to subtle usage criteria. Many
European languages are similar.

NOTE ALSO: Perfective/imperfective is a different aspectual
distinction, where perfective talks about an act as a whole, and
imperfective about the part of an act that happens at the time under
discussion. English expresses this by context. For example: He ate
before he left (ate is perfective). He ate when I left (ate is
imperfective).

The close similarity of names (perfect aspect, perfective aspect,
perfect verb form) is a historical accident --- Latin had a perfect
verb form that expressed perfect and perfective aspect much more
consistently than the English sort-of-equivalent.

Finally, Trask explains imperfect as the traditional name of a verb
form combining past tense and imperfective aspect. So perfect and
imperfect are not parts of the same paradigm.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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