This course provides an overview over semantic issues related to aspect. Assuming a general distinction between lexical (situation) and grammatical (viewpoint) aspect, we will explore how both interact, also with Tense, to compositionally build up the aspectual interpretation at the sentence and ultimately discourse level. To illustrate “Slavic-style” aspect, we first focus on the aspectual system of Russian, the role of verbal affixes, the issue of so-called (im)perfective verb forms as opposed to (im)perfective meanings, and the difficulty resulting from this to spell out a semantics for in particularly imperfective forms, which can also be found in contexts that intuitively can be characterised as semanticlly perfective. In the second part of the course I will address commonalities and differences with the aspectual systems of other Slavic languages. Zooming in on the description and exploration of differences in the use of morphological aspect between Russian and Czech (and also Polish to some extent), I will address formal semantic approaches to explaining these differences, which all employ some notion of temporal definiteness. We will explore what this notion might be and how insights on definiteness from the nominal domain (individuals) can be transferred to the verbal domain (events and times).

While this course provides a general overview of the topics mentioned above, it will not provide a stepwise introduction to the formalisation of (inner or outer) aspect, but will instead mention formal approaches as such, including issues related to the syntax-semantics interface. A stepwise introduction to the semantic formalism of some topics we will touch upon in this course will be given in Deniz Özyıldız’s seminar.

Slides
– Introduction & inner aspect
– Outer aspect & Tense
– Aspect in Russian (towards the end: some comparison to Czech)
– The semantics of the Imperfective in Russian (with some comparison to Czech)
– Cross-Slavic aspect and temporal definiteness

Some background reading (and references therein)

Gehrke, Berit. 2024/to appear. Cross-Slavic aspect, passives, and temporal definiteness. In Berit Gehrke & Radek Šímik (eds.), Topics in the semantics of Slavic languages. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Gehrke, Berit. 2024/submitted. Aspect and finiteness. (Please do not cite for now.)