Verbal Aspect I

January 9, 2010

Dear Students,

Well, here I am again with my boring, rambling lectures. I look forward to the Spring semester, as my classes get pared down, the chaff drops away and the fruit of the field remains. Excellent! Welcome to 2010, which in my numbering system for files, is 10. So January 9, 2010 is 100109. The first day of the year was a binary number, 100101, which, as you know, is 29. Is that right? Sounds right to me. Any mathematicians here?

You know that there is a binary opposition of two aspects in the Russian verb system, a privative opposition, wherein the perfective (P) always bears a semantic marker, and the imperfective (I), is unmarked. So we say the perfective signals change of state (A > B), crossing of a boundary, completion of an event or beginning/end of a process; the imperfective doesn’t signal anything at all. Formally, the P is marked by its prefix: прочитать –– читать, but the derived imperfective is marked by its suffix: прочитать > прочитывать ‘read through’. The I usually bears one of two canonical meanings: it means an event or action in process: я читаю книгу, я читал книгу ‘I am reading a book’, ‘I was reading a book’ or an iteration of events: ‘I read books’, ‘I used to read books’. Note that the I past can mean ‘I read the book’, ‘I read a book’: я читал книгу. But the P past я прочёл/я прочла книгу means ‘I read the book, finished it’, or, with perfect meaning, ‘I have read the book’. These meanings are specific to P; they are explicit, they are there, at hand. If the I means one of those, it is submerged in context.

There is a wide range of meanings here, as every single verbal idea has to be either P or I, but not both and not neither. As Jakobson used to say, “in English, verbs have aspects [e.g. progressive aspect: I am singing], but in Russian, aspects have verbs.”
This then entails that specific contexts have very specific ways of implementing the semantics of P and I. For example, to say something is forbidden, one uses the I; to say it is physically impossible, the P: нелься переходить улицу ‘do not cross the street/, нельзя перейти улицу ‘it impossible to cross the street’.

The imperative, when expressng a polite invitation to a social action, like ‘sit down’, ‘come in’, ‘take off your coat’, is normally I. So: садитесь, входите, раздевайтесь. Giving an order to a dog to sit, stand, or lie, one uses the familiar P: сядь, ляг! A doctor examining a patient may say сядьте сюда на стол, ‘sit over here on the table’, since politeness is not an issue. When responding to a knock at the door — and one doesn’t know who is there — one will use the P: войдите ‘come in’. If one recognizes the visitor, the polite I takes over: входите.

In the infinitive, when conceptualizing a complex action of intellectual experience, one has to use the P: я хочу увидеть Красную площадь, я хочу прочитать эту книгу, я хочу рассказать вам, как это было ‘I want to see Red Square’, ‘I want to read this book’, ‘I want to tell you how it was’. These forced P infinitives may strike us as too strict. Why P, when I don’t necessarily know if I want to read the whole book? And I thought увидеть meant ‘catch a glimpse of, see’. Well, not exactly always.

Still the basic meaning of I and P somehow is there. A good example: дом еще не загорелся (P), но несколько раз загорался (I ) ‘the house hasn’t burned down yet, but several times it caught on fire’.

Context is all.

gmc