Aspects
Aspects in linguistics refer to different perspectives or dimensions of language that can be analyzed and studied. These may include phonological aspects (sounds), syntactic aspects (sentence structure), semantic aspects (meaning), and pragmatic aspects (language use in context). Understanding these aspects helps linguists and language learners comprehend the complexities of language and communication.
6 Key excerpts on "Aspects"
- Josep Quer, Roland Pfau, Annika Herrmann, Josep Quer, Roland Pfau, Annika Herrmann(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...9 Aspect Theoretical and experimental perspectives Evie A. Malaia & Marina Milković 9.1 Theoretical foundations of aspect The variety of the world’s languages, including sign languages, has resulted in the need for multiple ways to describe the temporal structure of sentences: tense and aspect. Tense is the easier one to understand: it describes the temporal location of an eventuality in relation to some other point in time (often, another eventuality, which might both be referenced in one sentence). Aspect, on the other hand, refers to the way in which the eventuality itself unfolds in time – how long it takes, whether it is dynamic or static, etc. – from the point of view of the speaker. Linguistic means to encode aspect can vary across languages – the same abstract concept might be denoted by grammatical means in one language, and lexical in another; sign languages use both manual and non-manual means to express aspect. This chapter is concerned with a variety of means of encoding aspect across sign languages, and the ways to precisely express aspectual meaning in relation to the verb’s event structure using spatial means. We will start with lexical aspect – i.e., temporal properties of an event that are implied as part of the verb’s lexical entry. We will then consider systems for denoting grammatical aspect in the languages where these exist, and the relationships between event structure and potential means of aspectual modification, as revealed by empirical research across a variety of sign languages. 9.1.1 Lexical aspect (Aktionsart /event structure) Lexical aspect (also known as Aktionsart, or event structure) describes inherent temporal properties of an eventuality denoted by the verb. Several systems of describing these temporal properties exist...
- Mari B. Olsen(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...I Introduction 0.0 OVERVIEW This work studies two related phenomena in human language: the ability of verbs and other lexical items to describe how a situation (event or state) develops or holds in time (LEXICAL ASPECT) and the view some verbal auxiliaries and affixes present of the development or result of a situation at a given time (GRAMMATICAL ASPECT). Through this investigation I hope to reveal a formal situation structure represented by aspectual phenomena, a structure to which other linguistic elements make reference, particularly tense. This structure describes the semantics of aspect and provides a principled input to pragmatic aspectual interpretation. Studies of linguistic aspect have diverged on the most basic levels, concerning what aspectual properties need to be accounted for and what constitutes evidence for them. Given the variety of lexical, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic elements contributing to the interpretation of aspect, it is not surprising that analyses—whether broadly theoretical or examinations of aspect in a particular language—differ widely. The variation between these studies masks the relations among lexical and grammatical aspect phenomena. Furthermore, few (if any) theories provide an explanatory account of the relation between aspect and tense and the tendency for each, in the absence of the other, to acquire default temporal interpretations resembling those generally assigned to the other. In this study I examine both typological studies of aspect (esp. Comrie 1976 and Smith 1991) and tense (esp. Reichenbach 1947 and Comrie 1985) as well as case studies of individual languages. I propose that a principled perspective on both the literature and the phenomena it describes may by gained in the context of a theoretically sound linguistic framework for describing the generation of aspectual interpretations in individual languages and cross-linguistic variation between aspect systems...
eBook - ePub- Zuzana Toth(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
...Studies on instructed SLA therefore adopt a form-oriented approach, meaning that they investigate the distribution of a specific verbal form in the interlanguage and ask “where it is used by learners, thus determining what it means in the system” (Bardovi-Harlig 1999 : 345). As pointed out by Bardovi-Harlig (1999: 353), “If we compare the form-oriented studies to the concept-oriented studies, we find that the form-oriented studies are essentially concerned with the third stage identified in the expression of temporality – namely, morphology”. Although tense/aspect phenomena require a multilevel definition, several studies on the development of L2 tense/ aspect system emphasise the level of semantics as an explanatory factor and claim that the lexical aspectual properties of predicates guide the development of their morphological marking (Salaberry 2005 : 184). However, as pointed out in chapter 3, lexical aspectual features vary across languages and within languages. For instance, the lexical aspectual properties of verbs referring to the same process may vary across languages, while the same verb can assume various lexical aspectual meanings within a language. This variability leads to differences in the classification of verbal predicates across studies, limiting their comparability. For this reason, before discussing the results of studies focusing on the effect of lexical aspect on the development of verbal morphology, the next section will outline some differences in the classification techniques used by these studies. 4.2.1 The effect of lexical aspect on morphological marking of predicates As pointed out in section 3.2, Vendler’s model (1957) has been the most influential classification both in linguistic and acquisition research. According to this model, further elaborated by Comrie (1976) and Dowty (1979), verbal predicates can be characterised along three dimensions (dynamicity, telicity and punctuality), and classified into four lexical aspectual classes...
eBook - ePub- Bas Aarts, April McMahon, Lars Hinrichs, Bas Aarts, April McMahon, Lars Hinrichs(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Little consensus has yet been achieved, and a great deal remains debatable. Like tense, aspect is concerned with time, but differs from tense in two ways. Aspects “are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” or “situation‐internal” time (Comrie 1976, p. 3, 5, following Holt 1943), while tenses serve (roughly) to locate situations or eventualities (Bach, 1986) in “situation‐external time.” Second, while tenses represent objective differences, sentences differing only in aspect ((1) and (2)) can truthfully be used at one and the same time to report the same eventuality. We studied all night. We were studying all night. This kind of “aspect,” explicitly marked and part of the grammar, is called grammatical or verbal aspect. Aspect is also used, however, for a language‐independent, merely implicit, classification called lexical aspect, though more than the properties of solitary verbs is in question (Verkuyl 1972): (3) reports an activity taking place over time but (4), an event. John caught fish (all day). John caught a fish (right away). Insofar as grammatical aspect represents a view of an eventuality, it is called viewpoint aspect, in opposition to “lexical” or situation aspect, which concerns the aspectual nature of the eventuality itself (Smith 1983, 1986, 1991). Johnson (1977, 1981) and Dowty (1986) term the aspect markers aspect(ual) forms and the members of the aspectual classification aspect(ual) classes. In syntactic studies, these are respectively outer Aspects and inner Aspects (Travis 1992), since the former have greater syntactic scope than the latter...
eBook - ePub- William Frawley(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These Aspects spell out the full phase of an event: its beginning, growth, and end. Many languages encode these Aspects rather specifically, by particular bound morphemes. 7.4. UNIFIED TREATMENTS OF ASPECT In sections 7.2 and 7.3, we surveyed the principal Aspects, their meanings, and some of the ways they are encoded in the world’s languages. We now attend to theory. Our goal here is to unify the numerous generalizations made with regard to aspect and to put our descriptive material in a more streamlined framework, hopefully one that affords us a certain degree of predictability, as all explanations require. We concentrate on two theoretical tacks. First we provide a manageable and workable typology for aspect based on semantic notions. Though we consider several kinds of typologies of aspect, particularly aspect hierarchies and matrices, we settle on a “looser model” that types Aspects as open, closed, and phase, and orders more specific Aspects hierarchically under these categories. Second, we try to account for aspectual notions in terms of conceptual structure so that diverse semantic phenomena can be given a unified conceptual treatment. This goes some way toward justifying the claim that mental models ground semantic systems, or at least that our internal models of the world deliver the components that allow us to fix the referents for our expressions. 7.41. Typologies of Aspect The literature is replete with studies proposing unified accounts of aspect and related notions. The work as a whole is so voluminous that it is impossible for anyone to summarize it thoroughly, much less assimilate it without duplicating others’ already published efforts (though Brinton 1988 makes an admirable try)...
eBook - ePub- Wolfgang Klein(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Aspect 6.1 The Notion of Aspect The lexical content of a clause has no place on the time axis. Hence, it bears no direct temporal relation to any other lexical content, nor to a distinguished subsegment of time, like the time of utterance. It is not part of that structure which we call time. But it can be embedded in time – it can be hooked up to some time span, the topic time TT, which in turn stands in a temporal relationship to other time spans. This is what happens in an utterance: it brings together a TT and a lexical content. This ‘lexical content embedded in time’ is a selective description of a situation which occupies a certain time span, the situation time TSit. What we understand TSit to be in a given case depends on three factors: the position of TT to which the situation in question is linked; the temporal characteristics of this situation as it is described by the lexical content: is it a temporary or a non-temporary content, and in the former case, is it a 1-state or a 2-state content? the particular way in which the situation is linked to the given TT. It is this latter point which we shall examine in this chapter: aspect. Aspects are ways to relate the time of situation to the topic time: TT can precede TSit, it can follow it, it can contain it, or be partly or fully contained in it. In principle, all temporal relations definable by the ‘Basic Time Concept’ (BTC, from section 4.2) could be used as Aspects. In practice, however, languages only choose a very selected subset of these relations for their systems of aspect marking. It is useful to distinguish three main possibilities: A TSit is interpreted as fully including TT (abbreviated TT INCL TSit). B TSit is interpreted as partly including TT (abbreviated TT AT TSit). C TSit is interpreted as excluding TT (abbreviated TT EX TSit). As defined in section 4.2, INCL is ‘fully included in’...
