Re: Interesting way of expressing tense/aspect distinctions.

On Friday, March 19, 2004, at 11:16 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:

[snip]
> Basically, rather than being marked for tense and aspect in the usual way,
> the verb is marked for inception and termination. The inception marker
> (probably a prefix) indicates when the action begins, and the termination
> marker (probably a suffix) indicates when it ends. The possible values for
> each of them might be distant past, immediate past, present, immediate
> future and distant future,
I came on across a proposed system similar to this many years ago..

> with the possibility of a null value for "unspecified".
..but without the "unspecified" value.

The scheme is, of course, 'one dimensional'. I tend to think of tense &
aspect as two different 'verbal dimensions', so I'm wondering how your
scheme would work out. Without the 'unspecified' marker, the scheme seems
to only to be a way of dividing up time, i.e. tense.  But the addition of
the 'unspecified' marker does add something of aspect, e.g. a
non-unspecified terminator, I guess, shows perfective aspect while an
unspecified terminator shows imperfective aspect.

I'm trying to see what unspecified inceptor implies. A verb with
unspecified inceptor & unspecified terminator suggests to me 'irrealis'
which seems to take us into the 'modal' dimension'

> This all maps out much the same semantic space as tense and
> aspect, but divides it up in a slightly different way.
I don't see how this addresses things like 'habitual', 'iterative.
'durative' aspect - or are yoou concerned just with the perfective ~
imperfective aspectual contrast?

An interesting idea - but I would like to see some actual examples.

Ray
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