John was winning the race.
Tense: past
Lexical aspect: telic (bounded)
Grammatical aspect: imperfective (ongoing)
We can't tell from this sentence if the perfective eventually held
(John had won).
John was running (in the race).
Tense: past
Lexical apsect: atelic (unbounded)
Grammatical aspect: perfective (completed)
This sentence DOES entail the past perfective (John had run in the
race).
One can also vary tense independent of lexical and grammatical aspect:
is winning, will be winning
is running, will be running
has won, will have won
has run, will have run
Of course, as Rolf notes, sometimes the term aspect is used to cover
lexical and grammatical aspect, as is Aktionsart. I agree, first
thing we do (is NOT kill all the lawyers, since I'm married to one),
is to separate tense (timen of an action/state), grammatical aspect
(view of an action/state) and lexical aspect (Aktionsart 'kind of
action(/state)')
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Mari Broman Olsen
Research Associate
University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
3141 A.V. Williams Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658
molsen@umiacs.umd.edu
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