Re: "Anticipatory" Tense

Lars Henrik Mathiesen writes:
 > > Date:         Sat, 2 Mar 2002 12:46:18 +0000
 > > From: Tim May <butsuri@...>
 [...]
 > > 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).

Interesting - I guess this makes more sense (to have a grammatical
indication for) than immediacy, although personally I find it an odd
way of thinking about a future event.  Possibly a result of only being
able to think in English.  I can see it being useful to refer to a
future event relative to the time being discussed (which is in the
past or future), but I'm not sure I can see its usefulness in the
present.  A present state can't result from a future action one under
normal circumstances, after all.


 > 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).
 >
I'm aware of that, to the extent that it's discussed by Harrison.


 > 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.
I see.  I was using imperfect to refer to the "non-perfect" aspect,
but if this is incorrect, I'll stop.

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