[Tlhingan-hol] A demonstration of aspect we can all follow

[David Trimboli]

I've thought of an easy way to demonstrate the "it's not a concrete 
action" effect of perfective and continuous. In English.

A ship's captain calls down to the brig. An interrogator was assigned 
the job of extracting important information from a prisoner. The captain 
barks, "Report status!"

Now consider the possible responses.

"I interrogate the prisoner."

Present tense. It's true. It describes what he's up to. And yet he 
wouldn't say that. Why not?

Because when describing an event that's actually happening right now, 
and when you're intending that the "right now" part is expressed, you 
would say "I am interrogating the prisoner."

You would use continuous aspect.

You *have* to use continuous aspect. To say "I interrogate the prisoner" 
is to say it wrong. It's true, it's grammatical, but you're still saying 
it wrong.

Yet you *can* utter the sentence "I interrogate the prisoner" under the 
correct context. Let's set up a new context.

The ship's captain is giving a tour to a dignitary. They stop by the 
brig, and the interrogator greets them. The dignitary asks, "What do you 
do here?" The interrogator replies, "I interrogate the prisoner."

The interrogator is describing what he does *customarily*. He's not 
talking about a particular instance of interrogation. The moment he 
switches to continuous aspect, "I am interrogating the prisoner," he is 
no longer describing his *job*, he's describing his current action, a 
concrete instance of an action.

Klingon works in exactly the same way. When the captain says {Dotlh 
ja'}, the interrogator would reply {qama' vIyu'taH} or {qama' vIyu'lI'}, 
not {qama' vIyu'}. To say the latter would be like giving the captain a 
job description. "I know you interrogate prisoners, dog, but what are 
you doing about this one?!"

Now for the perfective. English can usually only express perfective in 
the past tense, and using the simple past tense. If the captain asks the 
interrogator, "What did you do today?" the interrogator might answer, "I 
interrogated the prisoner." He wouldn't use the past continuous "I was 
interrogating the prisoner" to answer that question, even though it 
would be completely true. "I was interrogating the prisoner" would be 
used in cases like "While I was interrogating the prisoner..."

But even if the interrogator wants to describe his job description in 
the past, he would say, "I interrogated the prisoner." English does not 
let you distinguish between perfective and imperfective in the past 
tense. You have to add other context to make yourself clear.

	"I interrogated the prisoner all day." (imperfective)
	"I interrogated the prisoner and got the information." (perfective)

This is where Klingon differs from English, because Klingon can indeed 
distinguish between perfective and imperfective in the past. {wa'Hu' 
X-pu'} is past perfective; {wa'Hu' X} is past imperfective. The former 
says an event occurred and completed yesterday; the latter says X was 
true or occurred regularly or habitually or theoretically or whatever 
(except not completely or continuously) yesterday.

	qaStaHvIS jaj Hoch qama' vIyu' (imperfective)
	qama' vIyu'pu' 'ej De' vISuqta' (perfective)

In fact, Klingon completely distinguishes tense and aspect, because 
tense cannot be expressed on the verb at all, and because the verb 
generally requires an aspect marker for that aspect to be true.

I hope this adequately illustrates why I say that describing concrete 
actions with temporal shape requires a Type 7 suffix, and that lacking 
such a suffix refers to a habitual action, condition, propensity, truth, 
and so on.

As usual, the warning from the beginning of TKD about words like 
"always" applies to everything above. It's not always borne out, and 
there may or may not be discoverable reasons why that is the case. This 
is true of both English and Klingon.

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/