322 The subjectivity of utterance

formal semantics are defective in that they cannot handle such

uses.

How, then, is aspect defined as an objective temporal cat­egory? It is impossible to give the same kind of answer to this question as to the question what is tense. For what it is worth, a general definition of aspect might run as follows: aspect is the category which results from the grammaticalization of the inter­nal temporal constituency (or contour) of situations (actions, events, states, etc.). Unfortunately, there is no single word of everyday, non-technical English which covers "actions, events, states, etc.". Some authorities now use the word 'situation' (as I am doing) as a technical term for this purpose, making it clear that in this technical sense it denotes, not only states of affairs, but also momentary events, on the one hand, and activities and processes, on the other.

What the general definition of aspect that I have just given makes explicit is the fact that (like tense and mood) it is a gram­matical, rather than a lexical, category. There are those who also use the term 'aspect' to refer to what we can agree are com­parable aspectual differences among different subclasses of verbs and adjectives: but this broad, non-standard, usage of the term can lead to confusion and should be avoided.

Aspect, then, is a grammatical category. Unlike tense, how-ever, it is intrinsically connected with the verb or, more gener-ally, with the predicate. Whereas the meaning that is expressed by tense is arguably not part of the propositional meaning of sen-tences, there is no question but that the kind of meaning that is expressed by aspect (granted that aspect is basically an objec-live, temporal, category) is included within the propositional content of sentences (or clauses). Arguably, 'He is singing' and 'He was singing' have the same propositional content (and in appropriate contexts may express exactly the same proposition): under this analysis of their meaning, tense will be a sentential operator which indexes the proposition (deictically) to the world which it purports to describe. But 'He sings' and 'He is singing' are, not just semantically, but truth-conditionally, non-equivalent in any world they purport to describe. Looked at from a semantic point of view — and more particularly from'

10.4 The grammatical category of aspect 323

the viewpoint of formal semantics - the difference between tense and aspect that I have just mentioned, coupled with the fact that the former is deictic and the latter non-deictic, is per­haps the most important difference that there is between these two grammatical categories.

Having emphasized the difference between aspect and tense in general linguistic theory, I must also emphasize the fact that in many natural languages there are verb-forms which are diffi­cult to assign unhesitatingly and exclusively to one of the two categories rather than the other. I must also point out that aspect is far more common throughout the languages of the world than tense is and, as well as being combined with tense in many languages, is found in many other languages that lack tense.

Among the notions that are most commonly invoked in dis­cussions of aspect are: duration, punctuality, completion, fre­quency and inception. It would be impossible in the space available to consider how these temporal properties are encoded in the grammatical systems of particular languages. For this, reference must be made to works listed in the Bibliography. However, I must mention, and comment briefly upon, the dis­tinction between the so-called perfective and the imperfec-tive aspects of Russian and other Slavonic languages. I will then use these comments as a peg upon which to hang one or two very general observations about the relation between semantics and ontology.

Although scholars disagree about the details, it is commonly accepted nowadays that the function of what is traditionally referred to as the perfective is to represent situations holisti-cally - i.e., in their temporally unstructured completeness -rather than as being temporally extended or structured. This very general characterization of the function, or meaning, of the perfective is admittedly difficult to understand without lengthy commentary and exemplification. Such explanation and exemplification as may be required is now readily accessible in textbook treatments of aspect. The first point that I wish to make has to do with the term 'completeness', and more parti­cularly with the fuller expression 'temporally unstructured