Aspect II

Aspect II

January 12, 2010

Let’s look again at how aspect is formed. Take a telic I verb, that is, one that aims at a goal, a completion or boundary-crossing, such as искать ‘look for, search for’, (ищу ищешь ищут) a telic verb that is resolved in the moment of discovery. With the prefix раз– the diffuse, bare verb gains a kind of contoured, more specified, concretized meaning, ‘search with intensity, across a certain territory’; the P разыскать means to search out and successfully find. The marked derived I разыскивать is a contoured process verb culminating in the achievement event itself. Cf. рвать I ‘tear’, P оторвать ‘tear off’, разорвать ‘tear up’. This is always a happy blending of prefix and root verb, and can be compared to English function word and verb, as ‘seek out’, ‘find out’, ‘look up’, ‘write down’, ‘sing through’. The verb alone is always a diffuse and unshaped notion, while the function word, or prefix, gives it contour, direction, territorial locus.

A key difference is the extra sharpness of focus we get in the inevitable Russian I ~ P, or P ~ I. If the verb is P, you know some sort of goal has been reached. If the verb is I, however, as in English, only context can tell you. So I is excellent for simply naming a process, activity, or state, without saying there is a boundary. This is especially interesting in the I past ‘constative’, or naming an event that ‘happened’ once, at least, in the past, without asserting any change of state.

Here are some examples of the I constative. Приходила мама ‘mother came’ (implying, most likely, that she left again and is no longer there), vs. пришла мама ‘mother came (she arrived, she is here now), which is very close to a perfect in meaning, with present relevance. Cf. кто здесь открывал окно? who had the window open here? (implying it is now closed, but the wind blew over a flower pot), vs. кто здесь открыл окно? ‘who opened the window here?’ (the window is wide open at the moment of speech). Some of the restrictions on these constatives are very strange and counter-intuitive. In wh- questions ‘asking for the agent or instigator’, the I is very common: кто сгроил этот дом? ‘who build this house?’ (the completed building is in plain view). One does not say, however, кто писал Войну и мир? ‘who wrote War and Peace?’; one must say, willy-nilly, кто написал Войну и мир?, with the P verb. Ехplanations for this are ad hoc: this is an eternal work of art and exists beyond a printed book or a cybertext, etc., which, in their appeal to aesthetic nirvana don’t strike me as convincing.

The I is supposed to be possible in the constative meaning if the focus is diverted from the essential event itelf. Example. You see a friend who has a nice haircut. You say: — Tебя неплохо подстригли, ‘You have a nice haircut there’. Спасибо, he says. You say: Кто подстригал? ‘who cut your hair?’ In a sense the I here is a kind of verbal reference to the original P event. Example. Здесь я написал мое первое любовное письмо к Аде ‘here I wrote my first love letter to Ada.’ Then you add писал карандашом ‘I wrote it in pencil’, referring to the first instance, a P, with an I, and focusing on the instrument.

So it is not true, not true at all, that a I past can be translated “was ....x-ing,” as in French j’écrivais le livre ‘I was writing the book’. Any event in Russian can be denuded of its goal or boundary-crossing and made into a ‘mere’ process.