Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2.1 Three aspects of predication: Grammatical, lexical and secondary
As a way of introducing the often subtle interactions between grammatical aspect such as
the progressive in English (be + -ing as in “Beth is reading a book”) and lexical aspect
such as, for example, the difference between “to bite” and “to gnaw” in English (the
opposition is sometimes also labeled using the German term Aktionsart, lit., “type of
action”), I would like to turn initially to a few examples from English, where the two
phenomena and their interaction have been studied in considerable detail. To simplify
greatly, grammatical aspect draws a basic opposition between a perfective event, which is
represented as a single point in time with no duration, and an imperfective event, which is
represented as ongoing, extending in time. This opposition need not correspond to our
own tense-tainted collective imagination: an activity such as “to run” (without a
durational object or goal) can appear in either the progressive/imperfective or the non-
progressive/perfective aspect, representing—or so the story goes—two different
perspectives on the event, internal and external respectively.
(1) Past perfective Past imperfective
a. Sam ran. Sam was running.
b. Sam drove the car. Sam was driving the car.
c. Sam died. Sam was dying.
d. Sam built the house. Sam was building the house.
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