Talk:Perfective aspect

"In modern Indo-European languages, the concepts of aspect and tense are usually conflated, though they were once distinct."

Isn't this abit a west-european centric? In Slavonic languages, the concepts of aspect and tense seem be to still quite distinct, I suspect it also to be true with other IE branches I might not be familiar with.

Latin perfective and imperfective aspects in all tenses

I don't understand why this quote in the article is true:

"In other languages such as Latin the distinction between perfective and imperfective is made only in the past tense (e.g., Latin veni "I came" vs veniebam "I was coming", "I used to come").

First, I would describe veni as present-perfective, not the past-perfective. Second, it seems to me the better comparison would be the past perfective with the past imperfective, so veneram "I had come" vs veniebam "I was coming / I used to come". This makes obvious distinction of past completion and incompletion of action.

In Latin, I see the tense-aspect distinction quite clearly in the present and the future tenses, as well. It has seemed to me that Latin is simply taught as six tense-aspects (called "tenses" in books) instead of three true tenses and two aspects as distinct grammatical categories of verbs. Understanding the tense and aspect in Latin separately makes it more obvious how to properly implement indirect discourse and subjunctive sequence of tenses. I think a table like the one below can be useful in the article for demonstrating imperfective vs perfective aspect, if I'm not wrong. I hope a linguist can give input.

Commonly taught combined tense-aspect name in quotes, *e.g.* "pluperfect"
		Tense (active indicative)			Tense (active subjunctive)
		Past	Present	Future	Past	Present
Aspect	Imperfective	portabam I was carrying / used to carry "imperfect"	porto I carry / am carrying "present"	portabo I will carry "future"	portarem "imperfect"	portem "present"
Aspect	Perfective	portaveram I had carried "pluperfect"	portavi I carried / I have carried "perfect"	portavero I will have carried "future perfect"	portavissem "pluperfect"	portaverim "perfect"

So essentially, I argue the following Latin "tense-aspects" have the respective distinct tenses and aspects, fulfilling every combination:

"Present" = present imperfective
"Imperfect" = past imperfective
"Future" = future imperfective
"Perfect" = present perfective
"Pluperfect" = past perfective
"Future perfect" = future perfective

–ShyamBhakta (talk) 07:23, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Slavic languages and conflation of tense ad aspect

Though there are purely aspectual and purely tense-related elements in Savic languages, these languages still display a significant level of conflation of the two phenomena. Examples are verb forms such as aorist, imperfect, plu(squam)perfect, or the way Russian expresses future (complex forms for imperfective vers and the present for perfective verbs).

Tense and aspect

These categories are distinct; the sentence "The perfective aspect is one of the tenses in the Romance languages..." did not make sense to me for that reason, so I removed it. If someone knows what was intended here, please fix it up. Thanks, ArielGlenn 05:20, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Slavic languages

I had written 'Russian and other Slavic languages' but TaivoLinguist disagreed, and deleted 'Russian and other'. He writes on his own talk page: 'If a reader doesn't know what a Slavic language is, they can click on the link. In linguistics articles we don't list a representative language for every language family we mention. Articles would become unwieldy if that were the case. It doesn't matter whether you think Russian is more important or more searched for or not. You put Russian there and the Poles will want Polish and the Ukrainians will want Ukrainian and the Serbs will want Serbian. Then you get the arguments about which Slavic language is the most typical when it comes to perfective aspect. Leave it out. Taivo' – But I thought it useful to put 'Russian and other' in case non-European readers don't know what is meant by Slavic, to save them clicking on the link. What is the consensus, I wonder? Kanjuzi (talk) 19:02, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If this were a page on "10 fun facts about Europe", your point of the ill-informed reader might be appropriate. But this is an article on a linguistic topic. The vast majority of readers who come to this page already know something about linguistics and if they know about linguistics then they have a good idea what the Slavic languages are. Should we also write "...like Medlpa and other Trans-New Guinea languages..."? Certainly not. Taken to its logical extreme, then every single language family should have a representative language listed then the family name. That's not an option. Every single subject should be treated that way: "...like grizzlies and other bears..." You simply have to draw a line and require the one reader a year who might stumble here and not know what a Slavic language is to click on the link. Every single link in Wikipedia is there for a good reason: we cannot define "Slavic language" every single time that the phrase occurs throughout Wikipedia. --Taivo (talk) 19:10, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This is an encyclopaedic resource, not 'a dummies guide'. Please have the courtesy of not assuming ignorance on behalf of the reader. You want to "save" the reader the trouble of learning something they may be interested in exploring for themselves? Perhaps this article is targetting the 5 year old demographic. Linguistics and other academic disciplines, anyone? --Iryna Harpy (talk) 21:03, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I should think it would be helpful to put 'in Zulu and other languages of Guthrie zone S' or 'in Tamil and other Dravidian languages'. Remember that the introduction to an article is supposed to be less technical than the rest of it. I particularly wrote 'in Russian and other Slavic languages' since Russian is particularly often cited as an example of the perfective/imperfect distinction (e.g. by Comrie in his book "Aspect"). There doesn't seem anything wrong with it to me. Since both of you who have written so far are obviously Slavic specialists, perhaps you find it hard to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who is less familiar with those languages. Kanjuzi (talk) 07:59, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I would rather expand the sentence with further explanation and a couple of examples (saying it is "central to the verb system" doesn't really tell anyone much). If the examples come from Russian (there is already a Russian example, further down in the lead) then it will no longer be necessary to say "Russian and other...", and hopefully you will all be happy. W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:55, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is never a problem providing an example from a given language with, of course, the appropriate language label for the example. The problem is with the gratuitous mention of a language as if it is automatically typical of or uniquely illustrative of the family. --Taivo (talk) 10:40, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't say it is uniquely illustrative, but isn't it fair to say Russian is typical, at least as far as perfectivity is concerned? Kanjuzi (talk) 10:47, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What makes Russian more typical than Polish? Or Ukrainian? Or Serbian? Or Old Church Slavonic? It's not. The notion that "Slavic" needs to be qualified by a reference to Russian is simply unwarranted in an encyclopedia, especially on a page that will only be referenced by linguists or by people who know enough to click on the link if they actually don't know what the term means. And, as User:W. P. Uzer wrote, a Russian example is already on the page. --Taivo (talk) 16:41, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What I say is this: You have spoilt the balance of my sentence. I mentioned three languages: Russian (as a well-known example of where aspect is important), German (as a well-known example of where it is not important), and Latin (as an example of one where it is important only in the past tense). You have ignored the architecture of the whole paragraph by replacing 'Russian' with 'Slavic languages'. If you are going to delete something, delete 'Slavic languages' and keep 'Russian'. Kanjuzi (talk) 03:42, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to be going through some form of proprietorial problems. That it not how Wikipedia articles are built. If you wish to write your own version of this article, Wikipedia is not the venue for you. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 04:14, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It is not a question of it being 'my' sentence. It would be the same whoever had written it. I would be quite happy with the change if it improved the paragraph. The point is that it is not good style to make an antithesis of two things which are of different types. 'Russian' will balance with 'German', but 'Slavic languages' will not, or at any rate it is less satisfactory. Kanjuzi (talk) 17:00, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Although the essence...

This sentence from the introduction seems to me illogical: "Although the essence of the perfective is an event seen as a whole, most languages which have a perfective use it for various similar semantic roles, such as momentary events and the onsets or completions of events, all of which are single points in time and thus have no internal structure." The "although" part doesn't seem to fit logically with the rest. It is like saying "Although he was a tall man, he had difficulty getting into the tiny car." It would surely be better to omit the "although " clause. The word "similar" is also ambiguous here. Similar to what? And a "momentary event" is not "a single point in time", although it may last only that long. I would like to rewrite the sentence, but am not quite sure what the writer is getting at. Kanjuzi (talk) 03:52, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Combine...

Combine this article with imperfective aspect into a single Perfective and imperfective aspects? It would save repetition and duplication of work. W. P. Uzer (talk) 11:50, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Spanish imperfective

Just as for the Latin example, the "used to" frame should also be used for Spanish examples --Backinstadiums (talk) 08:53, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]