On Sun, 30 Mar 1997, James Campbell wrote:
Sevorian (formerly J2), as a Slavic lang, has a perfective and an imperfective aspect. (Imperfective is marked by an infix between the verb root and ending.) I'm also thinking about such meanings as "must..." and "can..."; are these correctly described as _moods_ or could they be handled as aspects? Actually, would it make any difference either way, if they were going to be marked by infixes whatever they get called? I'm just a little muddy about this point.These are aspects. Aspects refer to the internal remporal configuration of a verb. For example "I sang", "I was singing", and "I had sung" are all past tense, but are of different aspects. One is a simple past, one is a perfective (completed) action in the past, and one is an ongoing action in the past.
Moods are things that refer to the 'reality' of a situation, such as subjunctive (if this were true..). In english, and in some other languages (pssibly the source of your confusion) the two glom together and what are commonly refrred to as moods often have more of an aspectual character than a modal one.
Also, what you are discussing are not infixes. They are affixes, or more specifically, suffixes, that happen to be ordered. These suffixes must be applied before the suffixes for person, number, what have you. infixes, technically, are those addition which go _into_ the root. Since these do not intrude into the root, they're not, technically, infixes. An example, for clarification.
In Old Gal (my generic example language!) aspect is infixed. So If we have a verb 'bal' meaning 'to hit', the infixes would show up as follows:
balan : I hit (present) /bal@n/
bhalan : I hit (past) /val@n/
bhalarin : I had hit (past perfective -ri-) /v@larin/
bhahlin : I was hitting (past prog. -si-) /va7in/ 7:voiceless l
balarin : I have hit (pres. perf.) /bal@rin/
bahlin : I am hitting (pres. prog.) /ba7in/
Copyright © 1997, Peter Clark,
Last updated: July 14, 1997