Re: Aspect revisited

Jerry wrote :

> If it is fair to rephrase it as "he (has/had) stopped (his) running",
> it would meet the condition for a perfective: the use of a form of
> "have". If I diagram it in Vector Time Tense it comes out as a
> perfective if the time of stopping is known or definite (constant, ke
> or j); and as an imperfect if the time of stopping is unknown
> (variable, zu) and was allowed to slide along the timeline to finish
> at an unknown moment. "Imperfect does not connote completeness of
> action at any specific time"- JBO.
> It seems like an ambiguous tense.
>
> And yet I'm still not sure if I am correct in this.
>
I don't know either but I do agree with you : perfect, perfective, progressive
aspects etc. may attach to time vectors of either discourse (= tense), verb,
auxiliary, case tag and argument and then they can attach to *process*
integrated within argument from less to most integrated. So you may have aspect
of the verb combined with aspect of auxiliary and aspect of argument in a
sentence like : *I had finished completion of the preliminary works* ;-)
Perfect is axed on *reference time* (not *reference tense*) but *perfective* is axed
on the advent of a final state called *extremal*. Extremal may be already
encoded inside a word (to see vs. to look // to learn vs. to know). So how many
syntactic and semantic aspects can you count in the following sentences ? : I
have learnt --- I stopped learning (interrupted progressive implied within main
verb) --- I stopped to learn (no progressive implied within main verb) --- I
have stopped learning --- etc. And this is for English. Japanese has a slightly
different mapping because a lot of aspects shown within words in English are
*transferred* onto auxiliary in Japanese like in : kuru (I come) --> kita (I
arrive) // shiru (I get to know) --> shitteiru (I know). French is kind of
funny because it mixes aspect and tense, which makes it more consistent than
any other language ;-)
Mathias

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