324 The subjectivity of utterance

completeness'. 'Completeness' must not be confused with 'com­pletion'. Regrettably, this confusion is all -too common and has been propagated in many standard textbooks. What is at issue here can be related to the ontological distinction (which is lexi-calized in English though not in all languages) between events, on the one hand, and states, processes, activities, etc., on the

other.

Events (in the ideal) are like mathematically defined points in that they have position, but (ideally) no magnitude: they occur (or take place) in time, but they are not temporally extended. It does not make sense to ask of an (ideal) event, defined in this way, as it makes sense to ask of a state or activity: "How long did it last?" or "How long did it take?". Of course, in the physi­ cal world, there are no ideal events: a flash of lightning or a rap on the door, and even the Big Bang itself, will have had, objec­ tively, some extension in time (or space-time). But situations which, as a matter of fact, have temporal extension (i.e., dur­ ation) can be perceived, subjectively, as instantaneous (i.e., as events). Moreover (to come now to the heart of the matter), situations which are obviously and perceptibly durative can be represented as events: i.e., as situations whose temporal exten­ sion or internal temporal structure is irrelevant. The choice between the perfective and the imperfective aspect in Russian (and between variously named, but more or less equivalent, aspects in other languages) is in this sense subjective, even if the aspectual distinction itself is defined in terms of what appear to be the objective notions of temporal extension and instantaneity. Not only the definition of the terms 'perfective' and 'imperfec­ tive', but, as I have been emphasizing throughout this section,; the semantic analysis of aspect in general is even more controvert sial than is that of tense. The point that I have just made about subjectivity in the aspectual representation of situations holds independently of the question whether one takes a subjectivist or an objectivist view of the definition of aspect.

It also holds more generally in respect of the relation between semantics and ontology. Throughout this book I have adopted the viewpoint of naive realism, according to which the ontologi-| cal structure of the world is objectively independent both of

10.4 The grammatical category of aspect 325

perception and cognition and also of language. As we have dealt with particular topics, this view has been gradually elaborated (and to some degree modified); and a more technical metalanguage has been developed in order to formulate with greater precision than is possible in the everyday metalanguage the relations of reference and denotation that hold between language and the world.

According to the viewpoint adopted here, the world contains a number of first-order entities (with first-order properties) which fall into certain ontological categories (or natural kinds); it also contains aggregates of stuff or matter (with first-order properties), portions of which can be individuated, quantified, enumerated - and thus treated linguistically as entities - by using the lexical and grammatical resources of particular nat­ural languages. All natural languages, it may be assumed, pro­vide their users with the means of referring to first-order entities and expressing propositions which describe them in terms of their (first-order) properties, actual or ascribed, essential or con­tingent: such languages have the expressive power of first-order formal languages.

Whether all natural languages have the greater expressive power of various kinds of higher-order formal languages is a more controversial, and as yet an empirically unresolved, ques­tion. But some natural languages certainly do; and English, which, duly extended and regimented, we are currently using as our metalanguage, is one of them. It enables its users to reify, or hypostatize, the properties of first-order entities, the relations that obtain among them, and the processes, activities, and states of affairs (and other kinds of situations) in which they are involved. The lexical resources which English provides for this purpose include the second-order count nouns that I have employed in the preceding sentence, and throughout this section ('property', 'relation', 'process', 'situation', etc.), together with the appropriate verbs ('occur', 'take place', 'endure', etc.) and

adjectives ('instantaneous', 'static'/'dynamic', 'durative', etc.), which enables us to treat them metalinguistically as entities and

to categorize them ontologically.