The parameter
Tense locates a situation in time relative to a reference point, normally the moment of speaking. Aspect describes the internal shape of that situation: a bounded whole, or a view from inside of something ongoing or repeated. Comrie's formulation is the one to hold onto: a perfective form looks at the situation as a single unanalyzed whole, an imperfective form makes explicit reference to its internal temporal structure.
The two are independent, and that is what the parameter measures. A language may grammaticalize time and leave viewpoint to the lexicon, grammaticalize viewpoint and leave time to adverbs, do both, or do neither. English marks a past against a non-past and has one aspectual opposition, the progressive, but no general perfective and imperfective pair. Russian and Polish put aspect at the center of the verb: almost every verb belongs to a stem pair and the choice is compulsory in every clause. Mandarin inflects for neither. Turkish packs tense, aspect and evidential value into one suffix position, so the three cannot be pulled apart.
The labels break down in two predictable places. Authorities disagree on whether the perfect is a tense, an aspect or a category of its own, and Comrie treats it apart from both. Lexical aspect is the other: a punctual verb and a durative verb behave differently under the same ending, so one source form does not translate the same way twice.
How languages vary
- Tense-prominent: English, German, Dutch, Swedish. Time reference is obligatory on the finite verb; aspect is partial and periphrastic.
- Aspect-prominent: Russian, Polish, Czech, Standard Arabic. Aspect is marked on every verb form and cannot be left unspecified.
- Both grammaticalized: French, Spanish, Italian, Modern Greek, Turkish. The past divides by aspect, as in the French imparfait against the passé composé.
- Neither grammaticalized: Mandarin and Vietnamese, where the verb is not inflected and both values come from particles and context. Some analyses count the Mandarin particles as grammatical aspect; nobody counts the language as marking tense.
Dahl and Velupillai's WALS chapter 65 samples 222 languages and finds 101 with grammatical marking of the perfective and imperfective distinction against 121 without. Their chapter 66, on the same sample, finds 94 marking past against non-past with no remoteness distinction, 38 with two or three degrees of remoteness, 2 with four or more, and 88 with no grammatical past marking at all. Obligatory tense is a majority pattern, not a universal one.
Consequences for translation
Where a category is grammatical on one side and lexical on the other, the translation is a level shift, and it is obligatory: no choice of verb will let an English clause carry Slavic aspect. The rendering is built out of adverbs, aspectual verbs and periphrasis: "used to", "would", "kept on", "managed to". Those devices sit in different slots from the source suffix, so the target verb phrase is reassembled, which is a phrase structure change on top of the level shift.
Three consequences reach the desk of a project manager or reviser.
The rendering must be a document policy, not a sentence decision. The same Russian imperfective past supports "was signing", "used to sign" and "signed" in different contexts, and a text that alternates without reason reads as inconsistent even where every sentence is defensible. Decide once and record it.
Expansion is systematic. Aspect that costs a prefix costs two or three target words, in every clause.
Monolingual review cannot catch the loss. Flattened aspect produces fluent target text with no visible defect. Only the source shows that a continuing obligation was rendered as a completed one, and in contracts and judgments that difference is the substance.
Examples
RU>EN
- Source: Он читал договор. / Он прочитал договор.
- Target: He was reading the contract. / He read the contract through.
- Comment: One prefix separates the two Russian clauses. English has no grammatical means to carry the distinction and must reach for the progressive, an adverb or a resultative particle. Neither rendering is neutral: each adds emphasis the Russian did not carry.
ZH>EN
- Source: 我去过土耳其。
- Target: I have been to Turkey.
- Comment: The particle 过 marks experience of an event at least once before now. It is not a tense, and the Mandarin clause carries none. English cannot leave the verb untensed, so the temporal claim comes from the grammar of the target rather than from the source.
EN>DE
- Source: I was reading the file when the call came through.
- Target: Ich las gerade die Akte, als der Anruf kam.
- Comment: Standard written German has no grammaticalized progressive. The ongoing reading is carried by the adverb gerade: grammar in the source, lexis in the target, which is the reverse of the usual direction.
References
- Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Dahl, Ö. (1985). Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Dahl, Ö. & Velupillai, V. (2013). "Perfective/Imperfective Aspect." In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 65. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Dahl, Ö. & Velupillai, V. (2013). "The Past Tense." In WALS Online, chapter 66.
- Bybee, J., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W. (1994). The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.