A talk by Galia Hatav, Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida, is given in Debrecen.
Date and time: May 22, 2019, 12 noon
Venue: Studio 111
The title and abstract of the talk:
Perfectivity: A Bundle of Properties
There have been two main influential approaches dealing with the notion of perfectivity in language, namely, the completeness- and temporal approaches. Comrie’s (1976) analysis, developed further by the part/whole theories (Bach 1986, Landman 1992, Smith 1991/1997, Filip 1999 and Altshuler 2012, a. o.), defines perfective- and imperfective clauses as denoting complete- and incomplete situations, respectively. Klein’s (1992; 1994 and elsewhere) analysis defines the notion in purely temporal terms, stipulating that perfective clauses denote situations whose event-time is included in their reference-time while imperfective cla uses den ote situations whose event-time includes their reference-time. In this paper, I will show that both approaches are compatible, as each concentrates on one of the (im)perfective properties, but argue that those properties are only part of the picture. Connecting the dots between several studies on aspect in general and the Russian and Biblical Hebrew aspect systems in particular, I conclude that the perfective is, furthermore, a reference-time builder, as opposed to the imperfective, whose clauses must borrow their reference-time from the (extra) linguistic context.
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