Aspects of degree or intensity

The completive aspect indicates total completion of an activity, i.e. doing a process to the maximum possible degree. English examples: eat it all up (completive) versus eat (some of) it (non-completive); the fuel was used up versus the fuel was (perhaps only partly) used. The counterpart to this might be called the incompletive aspect; it indicates that the action was only partly completed or the verb’s object was partially affected.

The intensive, moderative, and attenuative aspects indicate the intensity of a situation. For example, when a liquid is moving in the moderative aspect, we use the verb “flow,” in the attenuative we say “trickle,” and in the intensive we use words like “gush” and “flood.” Similarly, when something emits light in the attenuative aspect we use verbs such as “glimmer” or “glow,” in the moderative we say “shine,” and in the intensive we say “glare.” An artificial language could derive these sets of closely related words from single roots using aspect markers, thus simplifying the task of learning the vocabulary.⁷

It is also possible to create an aspectual distinction for the concept expressed by the musical term crescendo, indicating an increase in intensity or degree; a few linguists have called this the evolutive aspect. Perhaps there is also an opposite decrescendo aspect.

Finally, an experimental suggestion: Marking the concept of “almost” or “just one step short of” with an aspectual affix would enable a language to convert “burn” to “smolder,” “believe” to “suspect,” etc.

Conclusion

If you want to design a language that is very expressive and able to derive a large number of related words from a relatively small inventory of roots, building a good system of aspect markers is essential. The ability to create these words by predictable derivation results in a vocabulary that has internally-defined meanings and is less vulnerable to misuse than an a posteriori lexicon taken from “recognizable” sources.

 

notes

1 Bernard Comrie’s book Aspect (Cambridge University Press, 1976, ISBN 0-521-29045-7) gives a good introduction to aspect, and is the source of some of the examples used here.

2 Many of the relationships that are expressed by prepositions in English and its relatives are expressed by verbs in some other languages.

3 Esperanto’s prefix ek- indicates an aspect of commencement and/or brevity.

4 Drawn from material in the reference grammar (now at lojban.org).

5 Some observers will object that these very brief actions do occupy several milli-seconds, and their duration could be measured with the right equipment. That’s not the point; human languages express the perceptions of ordinary people, not of machines and technophiles.

6 From The role of metaphor in the grammaticalization of aspect in Tamil by Harold F. Schiffman.

7 Vorlin’s infixes -oz-, -ez-, and -ig-, indicate the intensive, moderative and attenuative aspects, respectively. These affixes can also indicate the density or concentration of a substance or thing, as in bomoza ‘having a dense tree population’ versus bomiza ‘having few trees.’

 

Update History

February 2001: added links to footnotes 6 and 7; corrected some typographical errors.

July 2001: Added a sentence to the generic aspect paragraph.

November 2006: Improved the typography and layout. Updated several links. Moved this page from rick.harrison.net to rickharrison.com. Added a paragraph to the introduction