The Aspectual Meaning of Non-Aspectual Constructions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We'd like to thank the reviewer for their insightful and thorough review report. Please see the attachment for our replies.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Summary

This paper analyzes the viewpoint-aspectual value of constructions/markers that are not primarily aspectual in nature. It draws on a variety of genetically unrelated languages, broadening the empirical scope of research into '(im)perfectivity' beyond the usual suspects (Russian/Slavic, English/Germanic...). Moreover, the paper makes some original and innovative contributions to both method and theory. In terms of method, the authors operationalize the Present Perfective Paradox (PPP) into a clear-cut diagnostic for detecting perfectivity, which offers obvious advantages for replicability in comparison to (inter)subjective semantic intuitions of the type 'is the situation as a whole in focus'? And theoretically, they innovate by teasing apart '(im)perfectivity' and '(non-)transition-sensitivity' at the level of viewpoint aspect, which is traditionally assumed to be constituted only by the former. Claiming that viewpoint aspect concerns more than one parameter is a bold and exciting move—one I very much applaud!

In sum, the paper makes several important and original contributions to the literature on viewpoint aspect.

However. There are places where the paper can (sometimes: should) be improved: some general, others very specific. I will first make/pose some general suggestions/questions, before moving onto more specific ones.

General comments/questions

1. How does 'non-aspectual' relate to 'zero-marking'?
The paper delimits its empirical scope to "non-aspectual constructions" as loci of aspectual information. It is clear enough what 'non-aspectual' means, but I'm left wondering how this relates to "zero-marking" of (im)perfectivity, which is a common way of studying aspect (Bybee 1994 is a classic paper on this, more recent examples are Mo & Le Bruyn 2019 for Mandarin Chinese and Bogaards 2019 for Dutch). Do the authors see their 'aspectual non-aspectual constructions' as subtypes of zero-grammaticalization of aspect, or as a different phenomenon entirely? Taking a position on this would improve the paper's embedding in the discussion.

2. 'Viewpoint aspect' might be a more suitable term than 'grammatical aspect'.
The authors term their object of study 'grammatical aspect'—one of the several terms available to refer to aspectual information not lexicalized by Verbs/VPs. This might not be the best term, however, given that the paper is about grammatical items not (primarily) tied to aspect, whereas 'grammatical aspect' seems to refer to aspect markers as part of a grammar. There is a good alternative, though, namely 'viewpoint aspect', coined by Carlota Smith (1991/1997). This term fits in directly with the paper's Selection-Theoretical approach in that (i) Verbs/VPs lexicalize situations in terms of building blocks φ and τ, and (ii) constructions/markers with aspectual import impose an aspectual viewpoint consisting of those same building blocks. The terms grammatical/viewpoint aspect represent a formal/meaning perspective on the same phenomenon, and I think the latter is more suitable to this study.

3. Engagement with staples of aspectual theory
At two points in the paper, I am missing engagement with staples of aspectual theory:

• In Section 2, the authors discuss the relation between perfectivity and  referentiality, specifically "well delineated entities" (line 104). This is strongly reminiscent of the classic idea from Verkuyl (1972) that (im)perfective interpretations of a subclass of durative Events depend on quantization of the predicate's internal argument (e.g. "I ate apples"=Activity>Imperfective, "I ate one apple"=Accomplishment>Perfective). More recently, Tenny (1994) characterized this as phenomenon "measuring out". Given that the authors present this interaction as "less well known" (line 99), the difference(s) between the data from Hdi and these well-known works (Verkuyl, Tenny) should be made clear.
• Section 3.1—among other things—develops a distinction between States and Events in terms of (non-)homogeneity and (non-)boundedness. The most canonical way of making this distinction is in terms of dynamicity (dynamic/static) rather than homogeneity/heterogeneity (I am thinking mainly of classic works like Vendler 1957; Dowty 1979; Mourelatos 1981; Smith 1991/1997). How does the authors' distinction differ from the canonical one in terms of dynamic/static, and how is it better (for their purposes)?

4. Why is (non-)boundedness necessary to distinguish States from Events?
Related to the previous point, the authors argue in Section 3.1 that States and Events are (also) distinguishable by being (not) bounded in time. I am not sure I follow why the authors think that States are always unbounded (and Activities always bounded), and why this is a necessary condition for the Subinterval property and instant-identifiability (and later on, the introduction of 'Transition-sensitivity'). Put differently: isn't internal heterogeneity enough for non-instant-identifiability? Why do you need boundedness?

In general, I am therefore not convinced by the authors' argument that boundedness is relevant for making the State/Event distinction. Rather, (non-)boundedness seems to apply to States and Events equally:

• There are proposals in the literature that States can be distinguished in terms of holding permanently or temporarily (Individual Level States vs. Stage Level States, cf. Carlson 1977), or more specifically in terms of being transitory, acquired or inherent (Croft 2012:58).
• The other way around, Activities have also been proposed to be divisible into bounded and unbounded types: directed and undirected/cyclic Activities (Croft 2012:61).

The main argument in the paper is for including (un)boundedness is that "events, as opposed to states, require the input of energy can therefore not go on forever" (lines 185-186). But it is easy to think of States that require energy-input, e.g. "be/stay awake", and also Activities that do not, e.g. "grow/freeze/dry". I would argue, therefore, that the notion of "cannot go on forever" is not a component of the semantics of these predicates, but rather of their pragmatics.

Given the cross-cutting of (un)boundedness with the State/Event-distinction in the literature (a.o. Carlson 1977; Croft 2012), and the problems with the authors' argument I pointed out here, I would suggest the authors either make this part more convincing or remove '(un)boundedness' from the distinction (my preference being the latter—this would have minimal consequences for the rest of the paper).

5. Not-quite-minimal pairs in results section
One final issue arises in Section 4, where the authors apply the PPP to various types of marking on stative and dynamic predicates. The best way to do this, I would argue, is to use minimal pairs that differ with respect to only one situation-aspectual parameter (i.e. dynamicity), that is: States versus Activities. However, in (8) and (16), the dynamic predicate is an Achievement, and in (13) a Semelfactive. These differ from States not only in dynamicity, but also durativity (being punctual rather than durative). On the other hand, (9), (14), (19) and (21) do feature Activities.

The comparison would be clearer and more convincing, in my view, if all dynamic examples would be Activities (or, if need be, Accomplishments, as in (22)-(23)). In this way, the potential effect of the interaction of punctuality with the grammatical markers under discussion can be excluded. As it stands now, punctuality is not ruled out as an intervening variable. If the authors have reasons to suspect that this interaction does not play a role, they should mention them; otherwise different examples are desirable for (8), (13) and (16).

Specific comments/questions

Line 1: List of used glosses is missing, please add it.

Line 23: "Grammatical aspect systems most often make a binary distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect." Add a citation for this quantitative typological claim?

Lines 24+28: Comrie (1976) and Bybee et al. (1994) are monographs, so their citations need page number(s) added.

Line 28: Citation "(Bybee et al. 1994)"  rather than "(e.g. Bybee et al. 1994)" makes it seem as though they coined the concept of "boundedness" to define (im)perfectivity, which isn't true (you also find boundedness in Smith 1991:49, for example). Maybe cite more works or change to "e.g."?

Lines 38-39: The most canonical term for 'actionality'/'lexical aspect' is 'Aktionsart'—seems strange to me to not at least mention this term here to help the reader. Maybe add?

Lines 47-52: An example of this phenomenon in English would be very helpful at this point in the introduction. (Getting the first example in paragraph 3 feels rather late.)

Lines 72-74: The claim "[i]t is widely accepted" in my view requires more than 2 references. Suggestion: Boogaart & Trnavac (2011).

Line 73: Citation "Condoravdi 2002" is listed as "Condoravdi 2001" in reference list.

Line 82: Citation "von Prince, 2019" is not in reference list, please add. (Also, comma between author and year needs to be removed.)

Line 85: Comrie (1985) is a monograph, please add page number(s) to where cited observation is from.

Line 90: Small language issue: "even though a lot less" strikes me as an odd formulation, consider rephrasing.

Line 108: "Françoise Rose (p.c.) assumes...", the verb assume is odd to me in this contexts, maybe replace by 'argues' or 'suggests'?

Lines 120-121: Van der Voort (2004) is a monograph, please add page number(s), particularly for "according to the author...".

Lines 172-203: This paragraph is very long, consider splitting it up.

Line 283-292: Small issue of notation: Bickel (1997) uses a lowercase tau (τ) for transitions/bounds, not an uppercase one. Given that later proponents of Selection Theory do so as well, it might be advisable to change Τ to τ.

Line 416: In this example (and others too) the glosses are not aligned, make sure to fix this.

Line 436-437: "durative and punctual aspect can be roughly equated with the opposition between perfectivity and imperfectivity." The way this is formulated makes it seem as though the way these can be equated is durative—perfective and punctual—imperfective. It should probably be the other way around, right? In any case, please clarify.

Line 520: "Many more such examples can be found in the grammar." Where exactly? Please add reference + page numbers.

Line 559: "Many more such examples can be found in the grammar by Guirardello." Where exactly? Please add page numbers.

Line 622: Van der Voort (2004) is a monograph, please add page number(s).

Line 676-710: This paragraph is very long, consider splitting it up, for instance at line 687 or 688.

Lines 774-776: "there are no indications that this present/non-present pattern of stative/eventive verbs is attested with other constructions in the languages under consideration" This claim is difficult to assess without references to specific examples in the grammars under study. Maybe consider adding at least one such example for each of these languages either at this point or in Section 4?

References: not in line with Languages' formatting conventions. More importantly, sometimes info is missing (e.g. Condoravdi 2001/2002 missing page numbers; von Prince 2019 missing entirely). I would suggest checking the entire paper once more for errors of this type—there may be ones that I have missed.

Mentioned references

(Bogaards 2019) Bogaards, Maarten. 2019. A Mandarin map for Dutch durativity: Parallel text analysis as a heuristic for investigating aspectuality. Nederlandse Taalkunde 24: 157-193.

(Boogaart & Trnavac 2011) Boogaart, Ronny, and Radoslava Trnavac. 2011. Imperfective aspect and epistemic modality. In Cognitive approaches to tense, aspect, and epistemic modality. Edited by Adeline Patard, and Frank Brisard. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 217-248.

(Bybee 1994) Bybee, Joan. 1994. The grammaticization of zero: Asymmetries in tense and aspect systems. In Perspectives on grammaticalization. Edited by William Pagliuca. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 235-254.

(Carlson 1977) Carlson, Greg. 1977. Reference to kinds in English. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts.

(Croft 2012) Croft, William. 2012. Verbs: Aspect and causal structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(Dowty 1979) Dowty, David. 1979. Word meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.

(Mo & Le Bruyn 2019) Mo, Chou, and Bert Le Bruyn. 2019. The absence/presence of aspectual markers in narrative discourse in Mandarin. Workshop on Tenselessness 2, Lisbon, 3-4 October 2019.

(Mourelatos 1981) Mourelatos, Alexander. 1981. Events, processes and states. In Tense and aspect. Edited by Philip Tedeschi, and Annie Zaenen. New York: Academic Press, 191-212.

(Smith 1991) Smith, Carlota. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect. 1st ed. Dordrecht: Springer.

(Smith 1997) Smith, Carlota. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect. 2nd ed. Dordrecht: Springer.

(Tenny 1994) Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual roles and the syntax-semantics interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

(Vendler 1957) Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review 66: 143-160.

(Verkuyl 1972) Verkuyl, Henk. 1972. On the compositional nature of the aspects. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Author Response

We'd like to thank the reviewer for their insightful and thorough review report. Please see the attachment for our replies.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

 

See attachment

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We'd like to thank the reviewer for their insightful and thorough review report. Please see the attachment for our replies.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf