Verbal arguments and measurement

2.6.4 Verbal arguments and measurement

The temporal properties of a situation are often specified by verbs, but languages map them also to nominal dependents. This notion is particularly important in the Finnish temporal system. Scholars consider the case of the direct object to be for the central marker of temporal progress (see Section 4.3). This is related to the fact that thewhole-partconcept is fundamental to human capacity to grasp the world (Hardegree 2001a: 3). Both events and objects are conceptualised as consisting of parts: cooking is a set of ordered procedures, machines are made of screws, plates, cables. Assuming that a situation involves some mediated material, this material has parts: a book consists of chapters, a dance is made of steps and figures.

The contribution of nominal phrases to temporality has been aconcern of for-mal semanticists such as Dowty (1991), Krifka (1992), Tenny (1994), and Filip (1993) who all conclude that some types of argument encoded mainly in a syn-tactic object are capable of “measuring out” the situation. Dowty (1991) calls this phenomenontheme-to-event homomorphism. For example, in the situationeating an applethe portion of eaten apple correlates directly with the progress of the situation, which terminates with a disappearance of the apple. Therefore, a tem-poral property of the situation can be mapped to the syntactic object, in this case the apple. This is not possible in the case of a situation ofliking Mary, because the time ofliking Maryapplies always to the whole, indivisible unit. It cannot be assigned to parts of Mary (one cannot say that at the timet1he liked the hand of Mary, att2the handandthe shoulder until att3he likedthe wholeMary).

The progress which is mapped to an argument can apply to the change in quantity or quality (all or part of) of the argument. It is represented in the above situation eating an apple(quantitative change) or peeling an apple (qualitative change). The homomorphism which is mapped directly to the change of argument I callARGUMENT SCALE.

However, the change does not need to affect the argument to which the tem-poral progress is mapped physically. This is prototypically the case of movement-related situations, such asputting an apple on the table. In that case, mapping is the result of the change of position between the mover and the argument which marks thePATH SCALE. The position of the mover in relation to the path is homo-morphic to the temporal progress.

Finally, in situations such asreading a book,playing a songthe argument does not change, but is a medium onto which some sort of mapping is possible. As one cannot say a priori whether this type of homomorphism is more similar to the argument scale or to the path scale, I call this type INHERENT SCALE homomor-phism.

The two types of scale – argument and path – are usually distinguished by scholars (Caudal 2005; Tenny 1994), while no distinction is usually made between argument-scale and inherent-scale homomorphism. Additionally, the constraints on selecting the types of argument enabling those three types of measuring remain unclear. One of the tasks of the present study is to verify the theoretical claim that some arguments have a role in expressing temporality.

Chapter 3

The Polish verb, Verbal Aspect and temporality

3.1 Theoretical approaches to PVA

In this chapter, I turn to the opposition between PFVandIPFVin Polish¹, which covers the whole verbal paradigm.

During the twentieth century, a certain development in the research on Slavic verbal aspect can be observed. The early studies of aspect were influenced by structuralism and the work of Jakobson (1971[1932]) which approached verbal aspect as a binary, privative opposition. One of the central question was marked-ness and the semantic invariant of the marked counterpart. Since the meaning of

PFVseemed easier to define, it received the status of the marked counterpart – both morphologically and semantically. Holvoet (1989) distinguishes two directions in which this question develops in Polish linguistics. In thetemporal-deictic direc-tion (in Polish linguistics induced by the seminal work of Koschmieder 1934), the notion of verbal aspect is built upon temporal deixis and belongs to the same level of language as tense and mood. In the other direction (represented by Antinucci

& Gebert 1957), the semantics of the predicate-argument structure is affected by

PVA.

In time, the structuralist approach lost popularity. In other words, scholars stopped searching for invariants, and shifted towards describing the functions of

PVA. The results of this approach are seen in the works of ´Smiech (1971, 1986)

1The narrow group of biaspectual verbs, that is, verbs whose aspect cannot be evaluated, poses an exception and lies beyond the scope of this study. An extensive list of biaspectual verbs can be found in Perlin (2010).

or the relatively recent description of PVAin the descriptive grammar of Polish by Bartnicka et al. (2004). Since finding one invariant proved impossible, schol-ars concluded thatPVA is not a unified mechanism, and its description requires accounting for several semantic features or levels.

Holvoet (1989) himself approaches PVA as a category with two levels: the temporal, tightly related to the temporal deixis, and the semantic, independent of temporal deixis, but referring to time as perceived by human beings. As to the temporal level, Holvoet (1989) follows Wierzbicka (1967) who claims that simultaneity is part of IPFV meaning, which PFV lacks. Duration in time and the existence of temporal bounds are to the temporal-semantic meaning ofPVA. These two dimensions are realised in various ways for different types of predicate, so Holvoet does not define a single semantic invariant, but distinguishes a set of functions which are realised by particular aspectual values.

Similarily to other notions from the temporal domain, PVA can be also de-scribed in terms of scalarity. I focus on that matter in Section 3.7, having first characterised Polish verbs (Section 3.2), and described the morphology ofPVA

(Section 3.5). In the last part of the current chapter, I discuss particular levels of temporality in interaction withPVA.