Iyionaku wrote: ↑12 Feb 2018 08:02
Imralu wrote: ↑12 Feb 2018 06:46
When you're reading an academic article about TAM marking and you note that some of the author's disagreements with other cited author's analysis look like they're coming down to some people knowing the difference between perfect and perfective and some simply always using "perfective" because it obviously looks more fancy and grammary.
I have heard people who state that there is no perfect, only perfective. And if you call the German tense "Perfekt" instead of "Perfektiv", you are obviously a moron with little or no knowledge of linguistics. \s
Yeah, coincidentally, it's a German author I'm reading ... writing in English, about Swahili. She's mentioning that some are arguing that the
-na- verb form (essentially present or occasionally continuous) are essentially "imperfective" and the
-ki- verb form (essentially a subordinated verb form indicating simultaneity, equivalent to "if", adverbial participles and used in progressive forms other than present) is "perfective". I can't quite understand the arguments for why
-ki- could be thought of as perfective because it seems pretty clearly imperfective to me ... and I think the author I'm reading refutes this pretty well (although I can't really be sure because I didn't quite understand the original argument) ... but it any case, the author seems to be using these correctly.
And then she discusses the
-li- verb form (essentially just past) and the
-me- verb form (essentially perfect, or resultative or recent past ... some disagreement) and some of the authors are calling these "imperfect(ive)" and "perfect(ive)" respectively and I'm like "AAAAAAAAH!" As far as I know, imperfect works for descriptions of a particular Latin tense (and in its descendants) because it is essentially a past tense with imperfective aspect, and this has led to simple past tenses being called "imperfect" in various European languages, whether these tenses have any imperfective aspect with them or not.
The thing that annoys me most about this is that the simple past
-li- tense is, if my understanding is correct, pretty clearly perfective:
blah happened. Calling it
imperfective is just plain wrong and clearly just a case of adding
-ive to be extra-profesh grammary. You
could call it
imperfect if you want to mindlessly follow the tradition of calling non-perfect past forms "imperfect" ... but, like, why? Just call it "past"! You can create a compound tense combining
-li- with the
-ki- (or sometimes the
-na- tense) to make it imperfective -
-li- on its own is quite clearly perfective. The perfect form
-me- seems kind of ambiguous to me as to whether it's perfective or imperfective ... it's kind of like the English perfect, indicating a past action but focusing more on its present effects, so I don't know how that fits into the perfective/imperfective discussion as I'm still learning the difference between those meanings. (Reading stuff by people who are themselves confusing two different things doesn't help me!) On the one hand, the
-me- form generally indicates an action which may or may not be finished ... but the effects of that action are explicitly relevant to the present (or another time when used in a compound tense). For example
-lewa means "get drunk". Using it in the perfect it means "be drunk", such as
nimelewa "I am drunk" (or "I have become drunk"). The transition from not-drunk to drunk is explicitly complete ... although I think it's ambiguous as to whether the process is continuing or finished (i.e. as to whether I'm still drinking or whether I've stopped). So, I don't know whether that would count as perfective or imperfective ... but I have a feeling it fits better with the label "imperfective" because continuing effect could easily be seen as an internal perspective on time. So, basically, when it comes to
-li- and
-me- there seem to be quite a few people calling a clearly perfective verb form "imperfective" and a quite probably imperfective verb form "perfective" ... *sigh*
I mean, I'm still learning, so maybe I've got a whole bunch of stuff wrong, but I certainly feel like I've spotted authors mixing things up pretty terribly just because of some
-ives added inappropriatively.