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Verbal Aspect in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Howard B. Garey
Howard B. Garey*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

The present interest in verbal aspect is largely due to the research of the Slavicists of the last century. Although many other languages (IE or not) have something which bears a strong resemblance to the categories of punctual, iterative, and durative as they appear in the Slavic languages, there are but few in which such a distinction is so clearly a part of the grammatical, nonlexical structure. Nevertheless, Slavic verb aspect has attracted the attention of some linguists to comparable semantic categories in other languages. This concept has been particularly fruitful for IE linguistics. In PIE the aspectual meanings are most particularly expressed by verbal themes, i.e. elements between the root and the ending; this process is described by Meillet and Vendryes (Traité de grammaire comparée §257) as expressing ‘les modalités de la durée, suivant que l'on considère le procès dans un point ou dans l'ensemble de son développement, dans son début ou dans son terme, suivant qu'on le suppose inachevé ou achevé, limité à lui-même ou prolongé sans un résultat, etc.‘

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 33 , Issue 2: April-June , June 1957 , pp. 91 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 For the role of Slavicists in the development of the concept of aspect, and for the history of the concept, see H. M. Sørensen, Om definitionerne af verbets aspekter, In memoriam Kr. Sandfeld 221–33 (Copenhagen, 1943).

The research on which this paper was based was largely made possible by a Morse Fellowship for 1954–5, for which I take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Yale University. I wish also to thank the following for their helpful suggestions and criticisms : Bernard Bloch, Jean Boorsch, Isidore Dyen, Philip Scherer, John Silber, Paul Thieme, Knud Togeby, Robert-Léon Wagner, and Rulon S. Wells. Above all, my thanks go to Henri Peyre, chairman of the Department of French at Yale, for his unfailing support and encouragement.

2 Wilhelm Streitberg, Urgermanische Grammatik §190 (Heidelberg, 1896).

3 Le bon usage 5 §607 bis (Gembloux [Belgium] and Paris, 1953).

4 Earlier editions lack this section §607 bis.

5 Syntaxe du français moderne (Leiden, 1947).

6 Des mots à la pensée: Essai de grammaire de la langue française (Paris, 1911–52).

7 Remarques sur les moyens d'expression de la durée et du temps en français (Paris, 1925).

8 La pensée et la langue (Paris, 1929). The first edition is dated 1926.

9 The historical development of tenses from Late Latin to Old French §1.2, §1.3 (Language diss. No. 51, 1955).

10 Op.cit. in fn. 6.

11 A vivid interpretation of the imperfect appears in §1709, which it is interesting to read at this point: ‘Le caractère commun à tous les emplois du toncal pur [l'imparfait] ... c'est que ce tiroir marque ... le placement du fait verbal dans une autre sphère d'action, une autre actualité, que celle où se trouve le locuteur au moment de la parole. La position naturelle et fondamentale de l'esprit c'est de centrer le monde des phénomènes sur le locuteur se concevant lui-même dans l'instant présent: Le “moi-ici-maintenant”. Ce mode d'apercevance des phénomènes constitue l'actualité noncale. Toutes les fois, au contraire, que l'esprit fait l'effort de se reporter dans un monde phénoménal autrement centré, on est dans une actualité toncale, et il apparaît dans la phrase soit le saviez [l'imparfait], soit, selon les nuances nécessaires, le tiroir complexe approprié.‘

12 See my dissertation (op.cit. fn. 9), p. 12 on the reference period.

13 There is a very good review of this work by Knud Togeby in Lingua 4.379–93 (1955).

14 Sten has chosen only the first of these definitions as the right one—quite arbitrarily it would seem. He explains the second as due to the habit of considering se noyer a perfective verb. Jouer, on the other hand, is generally considered imperfective, which explains why it is said that one who was playing bridge has in fact played bridge. But how many Frenchmenin-the-street have even heard the terms perfective and imperfective?

15 Sten recognizes the existence of these classes of verbs, which he calls (8) ‘les “perfectifs” (pour lesquels l'action n'a pas eu lieu si elle n'est pas portée à son terme, p. ex. tuer) et [les] verbes “imperfectifs” dont l'action s'effectue vraiment dès qu'elle a commencé, sans avoir besoin d'attendre la fin, p. ex. jouer.‘ But he has not grasped the systematic relations between the aspect of a verb and the aspect of a tense.