Subject: RE:Aspects:"prematurely"

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 22:02:07 EDT

Since I feel somewhat responsisble for this mess, introducing "superfective" 
from a draft of my dissertation, I think I should shoulder up the old job of 
summarizing where thing got to last time. 
First a bit of background: the idea of a superfective is that an event 
continues after a "natural end," where that is contextually defined. For 
precesses, where there is a natural end, completion, what continues is not 
(usually, at least) the process (which can't continue) but some related 
essential activity: "He has run the mile but he keeps on running." For other 
kinds of events, end is even more arbitrary and may need explicit stating 
somewhere: "He's eighty-five, but he keeps on running" "I've put on three 
coats of white paint, but it's still blue." Or it may be implicit but clear 
"He just keeps on talking" (long after I have stopped being able to listen). 

As these examples suggest, one of the expressions that goes with the 
superfective is "still", as well as "overlong," "excessive." and the like 
("too much" as opposed to the "just right" of {mo'u}, and like those factors 
depending upon some unstated standard or purpose). This suggests a "too 
little" ~ "not enough," stopping before the {mo'u} is reached. Although 
strictly {co'u} marks any end and {mo'u} only makes separate sense for 
processes, Gricean forces have taken {co'u} to mean "before {mo'u}," since 
saying {mo'u} if it applied would be fuller information (but this does ignore 
the possibility that one does not know what the status was at the stop). So, 
{co'u} took on the "too little" sense, "quit too soon," and {mo'u} expanded 
to cover non-processes when there was a possibility of the notion of "enough" 
applying.

This led to the question about the other end of the event, the beginning, 
where there were not two notions, corresponding to {mo'u} and {co'u} but 
there was definitely the possibility of starting too soon by some external 
standard or too late ("already" and "not yet"). Under one possible way of 
understanding what the Book says, these could be understood as aspects of 
negative events: starting p late is keeping on not-p and starting p early is 
cutting not-p short, {za'o na} and {co'u na}. This compounds the problem 
with whether this is really what {co'u} means with the problem about 
negation, but both of these issues are at least largely open to usage 
decision.

All of this was cross-fertilized by a set of terms already mentioned here: 
"still, " "not yet," "already," and "no longer." Which seemed to fit in with 
these in various ways. "Still" seemed to have ovious correlation with {za'o} 
, "not yet" was. of course, related to {pu'o} but also, as noted, to {za'o 
na}. "Already" had a use related to {co'u na} (premature) and so maybe "no 
longer" was related to {co'u} , but certainly to {ba'o}.
But then, it was noted that in these notions (and, indeed, the earlier more 
purely aspectual ones), the connection was not quite right: {co'u} marked the 
transition, the stopping, not the range after the stopping, which is what 
"already" and "no longer" aimed at (on one reading, at least). Whence came 
the proposed experimental {xa'o} which was to hold during the time between 
when something actually starts and the (later) time it should start, a 
"mirror" of {za'o}. "Already" applied in that time, at least.
There have been a variety of fiddling with this to get just what is wanted in 
each case, but no definitive answers to how to do all the things that some 
people have tried to do with these devices.

On the other hand, some poeople objected to these devices to start with. One 
view was that at least the "still" etc. set is not aspect at all, but largely 
things from attitudinals: something you expect doesn't happen and you are 
impatient so you say it hasn't happened yet, a combination of {pu'o} and 
maybe a weakened form of {o'onai}. And so on. This involves no change in 
grammar or vocabulary.

Another line was that these things should not be handled in the aspect system 
but in the bridi (with a slight whiff of the idea that ALL aspects really 
belong in bridi), explicitly spelling out how the events are related and to 
what: continues after expected end, and the like. This involves no changes in 
grammar or vocabulary, but does some damage to several linguistic theories we 
used to play with.

The new possibility, sketched by xod today, is that the tense/aspect system 
should have a (maybe more?) mark for the normal time of an event and then 
make a compound tense-aspect to cover starting before that beginning, running 
on after after than end and so on {co'a pu x}, {ca'o pu co' x}, {ca'o ba mu'o 
x} and so on, eliminating the need for {za'o} in the process. This involves a 
new vocabulary item (from the xes I suppose) and possibly some complication 
of the grammar, but does not seem to involve major problems, only additions.