Abstract
Aspectual viewpoints function like the lens of a camera, making objects visible to the receiver. Situations are the objects on which viewpoint lenses are trained. And just as the camera lens is necessary to make the object available for a picture, so viewpoints are necessary to make visible the situation talked about in a sentence. I begin by considering the aspectual viewpoints as general categories of universal grammar, discussing their organization and the role that they play in conveying information. Section 4.2 presents the main viewpoints, their defining properties and the variation that occurs in the five languages of this study. Section 4.3 discusses the conventions of use associated with the viewpoints.
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Notes
Chomsky explains the acquisition of parameters as follows. “The principles of UG have certain parameters, which can be fixed by experience in one or another way. We may think of the language faculty as a complex and intricate network of some sort associated with a switch box that can be in one of two positions. Unless the switches are set one way or another, the system does not function. When they are set in one of the permissible ways, then the system functions in accordance with its nature, but differently, dependencing on how the switches are set. The fixed network is the system of principles of universal grammar; the switches are the parameters to be fixed by experience. Acquisition of a language is in part a process of setting the switches one way or another on the basis of the presented data, a process of fixing the values of the parameters” (Chomsky 1988:63).
As I note in the Introduction, the relation between viewpoint and situation type, while familiar to scholars, has rarely been studied in a systematic manner. In several recent formal semantics treatments of English the progressive viewpoint is analyzed as an operator on situation type (Dowty 1979,Vlach 1980); it is not clear whether they regard the perfective viewpoint as basic or also as an operator. Hoepelman 1978, Brecht 1984, Timberlake 1982, analyze the perfective and imperfective viewpoints of Russian as operators. There are other similar approaches in the literature.
The Neutral viewpoint is a default in the languages studied here, because it arises only in the absence of an overt viewpoint morpheme. However, in principle a language might have a neutral viewpoint that contrasted with perfectives and imperfectives. I would like to thank Haihua Pan for helpful discussion of this point.
Neither Finnish nor Icelandic has grammaticized viewpoints, although there are optional lexical means for giving information about point of view (cf Heinamaki 1983, Fortescue 1984 ). The interpretations noted in section 4.2.3 for the neutral viewpoint hold for these languages. For instance, in Eskimo Achievement sentences cannot refer to preliminary stages of an Achievement without explicit lexical support (Woodbury, personal communication). The same holds for Achievement sentences with the neutral viewpoint in French, Chinese, and Navajo (cf examples 56, 57 below).
For discussion of the so-called imperfective paradox see Dowty 1977, Vlach 1981. The approach presented here is an intentional one: it depends on the notion of the telic property as intentional when it holds of a situation type. See the discussion in Chapter 6. Parsons 1988 presents a similar view. Recently Dowty has argued that the imperfective paradox can only be resolved with an intentional treatment of some kind (at a conference on Events at the University of Texas, 1988 ).
Conversational implications are invited but cancellable, that is, additional information can be given which blocks them. Grice presents a set of conversational postulates which are followed by users of a language, speaker and hearer. Conventional meanings are associated with linguistic forms and are therefore not cancellable.
Lyons 1977 presents an introduction to the contrasts among viewpoints. The contrasts are sometimes expressed as sets of features in formal opposition, e.g. punctual (closed)-durative (open), complete-incomplete, either one of which may subcategorize the other, and stativenon-stative (Friedrich 1974:S35). In each pair the first property is generally characteristic of the perfective viewpoint, the second is characteristic of the imperfective. Thus the aspectual system of a language may be characterized by the main oppositions of its viewpoint system. Friedrich proposes that the basic opposition of Slavic is complete-incomplete, while that of Homeric Greek is durative-nondurative. For other points of view on Slavic, see Forsyth 1970 and the references of Chapter 10.
Dense time contrasts with discrete time, which may consists of maximally small moments. In dense time, no smallest unit occurs: for any two moments, there is in principle always another moment between them. The notion that time is dense has been adopted by many scholars, e.g.Taylor (1977), Kamp (1989). There is a procedure for converting discrete to dense time, suggesting that the distinction between them may not be of great significance (cf Dowty 1979: 76 ).
Both sets of examples are needed to make this claim hold. One could argue that the apparently open reading actually arises from a closed inceptive interpretation that the beginning of the event has taken place. But the temporal clause conclusively demonstrates an open reading.
Minimality and maximality are discussed in connection with the conversational principles of Grice in Levinson 1987.
The Chinese neutral viewpoint represents a choice when it appears with non-stative sentences; statives require the neutral viewpoint. I shall not discuss the conventions for Chinese here (see Chapter 11 for some brief comments on choice of the neutral viewpoint).
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Smith, C.S. (1991). Viewpoint Aspect. In: The Parameter of Aspect. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7911-7_4
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