Re: Tense and Aspect

On Nov 2, 12:18 am, Dennis <tsalagi18NOS...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
        I'd like to know what the correct definitions of "tense" and
"aspect" are in linguistics.  

        In many (mostly popular) works, "tense" refers to the time of a
verb's action.  Thus the English phrase "I will come" is in the future
tense.  "Aspect" refers to whether the action of the verb is complete
(perfect) or incomplete (imperfect).  Thus in ancient Hebrew and most
versions of Arabic, the verb has aspect but no tense.  In Russian verbs
have a distinction of aspect as well as of tense.  

        However, in a linguistics course I was told that "tense" refers to
any morphological marking of a verb's form of action.  Under this
definition English verbs only have two tenses, present (I come), and past
(I came).  Furthermore, the perfect/imperfect distinction in ancient Hebrew
and Arabic would be called tense, not aspect, because it's shown by
morphology.  

        In this case "aspect" means any further indication beyond "tense" of
a verb's form of action.  Thus English "I will come" would fall under
"aspect", as, more obviously, would "I am coming", "I used to come", etc.  

        What is the truth of the matter?

Your first version is the most common usage; see Bernard Comrie's two
volumes, *Tense* and *Aspect* (in the Cambridge Textbooks in
Linguistics series). Note that "aspect" refers to rather different
phenomena in Slavic vs. Semitic. (And there's a third category,
Aktionsart, that also interacts with those two.)

Your second version ("linguistics course") uses "tense" as a label for
the totality of verbal categories that happen to be marked in English;
I would be surprised to find "aspect" used in that context at all.

Is the latter based on some textbook?
.

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