1.) “Вы читали Доктора Живаго вчера?” = Were you reading Dr Zhivago yesterday?
2.) “Вы прочитали Доктора Живаго?” = Did you finish reading Dr Zhivago?
3.) “Вы читали Доктора Живаго?” = Have you (ever) read Doctor Zhivago? (i.e. asking if the total act has taken place.)
Okay - that is actually very clear. But I’m still slightly wondering about my original question? (i.e. about possible differences due to the Aktionsart of verbs?) Let us consider for example:
“вы убивали турецкого преступника?” Would that mean “did you (ever) kill…(etc)…?” - i.e. same as (3.) above?
Or would you say: “вы убили турецкого преступника?”
There is an inherent difference between “to read” (a process) and “to kill” (a single sudden act). It’s very natural to see how one can finish reading a book. But can one “finish” the act of the verb “to kill”? Or are such verbs - by their nature - usually viewed as a perfective act? (i.e. unless one is thinking of a series of repeated actions?)
Thank you very much for all the replies.
+Sergeny. Your reply in particular has been especially illuminating. My question was exactly about what makes perfect/imperfect not exactly interchangeable even in situations in which you could in priciple choose both aspects.
You’ve answered quite clearly that you’d prefer imperfect to say things like “I watched that movie” and the use of imperfect would imply particular circumstances and a stress on the “perfectiveness” of the situation.
That’s exactly what I meant that imperfect is unmarked in these situations, whereas perfect is marked.
From Evgeny’s replies I gather that, in the case of a murder, markedness is reversed because the “default” way of saing “X killed Y” is by means of perfect.
That was the question I was trying to ask. Thank you again, it’s very useful.
The question ‘‘Have you ever + v.’’ always translates as ‘‘вы когда-нибудь + past imperfective’’. Eg. Have you ever been to the UK? – Вы когда-нибудь были в Великобритании?
Вы убили? may be either the past simple or the present perfect.
If you are in the process of doing something you are involved in this just by definition. All those verbs you mentioned (to kill, to break, to think, to read etc) can take both the perfective and imperfective form with roughly equal frequency. There isn’t such a thing as being usually viewed as perfective or being more perfective then imperfective ‘‘by default’’ (apart of those cases when the verb does not have an aspectual pair at all). Of course, you can take the verb and count how many times in total it occurs in the perfective form, how many in imperfective, but I’m not sure this will lead to something, it’s like to count which one is used more frequently ‘‘I think’’ or ‘‘I thought’’.
+Bautov. Again, it’s not about “frequency”, but about “markedness”. +Sergeney seems to agree with our intuition (and with Josu88’s experience) that one aspect tends to be perceived as just expressing the action whereas the other implies a special emphasis.
Sergeney discussed the example of смотрел фильм against посмотрел фильм and you (+Bautov) seemed to agree that they weren’t perfectly interchangeable. In that case, the imperfect seemed to be the “neutral”/unmarked variety.
The example I gave of a possible situation in which perfect might be unmarked is a headline stating that someone killed someone else.
Would you agre that (for a “typical” murder and without previous context), you would consider
X убил Y, a normal utterance, whereas Х убивал Y, would be a bit “surprising” as a headline and it would require a special contet or a “not so typical murder” to be perceived as a correct utterance?
If it was a regular event and you are discussing a serial killer, then you can say (sorry for the brutal details), “маньяк убивал беззащитных детей в подворотне”. It conveys continuity and mundaneness, making it very disturbing to read. From the news, “палестинец рассказал, как убивал израильских солдат”. If it is a first-time killer, you would use “убил” instead. However, I’ve just found another example from the news, also disturbing, “молодой человек показал, как убивал кирпичом девушку”. I would say, in this case either form can be used.
it’s not about “frequency”, but about “markedness”.
X убил Y, a normal utterance
Google ngram graph
Let’s take a look at it from a purely practical point of view.
Markedness can be considered as the ability of the unmarked category to replace the marked category in all contexts, even in those when the marked category theoretically may be more appropriate to use. For example, in Spanish the progressive form can be replaced with the non-progressive without changing the meaning (eg. Qué haces? / Qué estás haciendo?). Other parts of speech can also form marked/unmarked pairs, for example, nouns: eg. león/leona, where the first one is unmarked and can be used in a general sense.
In Russian, the perfective aspect cannot be replaced by the imperfective (exept for a few verbs in some marginal cases where the context is clear and there is no ambiguity). Aspects are always semantically different and mean two different things, so being ‘‘normal’’ or ‘‘typical’’ in the sence you mean is not an integral part of a given verb, what we can talk about is the frequency with which this verb is normaly or typically used. (Verbs can be marked/unmarked morphologically, but we are not discussing morphology here).
In the past and future tenses in Russian the perfective is more common that the imperfective, the present tense is always imperfective. For that reason, one might say that the perfective is unmarked for past or future tenses and imperfective is inmarked for present tense. But again, that’s just frequency. Does it give something to you in practical terms? Nothing, apart from the fact that if you randomly choose the perfective to use with the past you have 50+% of chance to be right. To use aspects correctly you should understand the semantic structure of the verb in each of given contexts.
+Bautov. I agree completely with what you say but I meant something different.
Yes, perfective/imperfective are not in general interchangeable in meaning, so “markedness” is not applicable.
But what I said is this:
In cases in which perfective/imperfectie are interchangeable, one of them is unmarked and the other one marked. Only in those cases. That’s the reason of our focus on examples such as Я смотрел/посморел фильм. The Х убил Y example is, admittedly, not a very good one in this regard but Jay and myself wanted to contrast the two possibilities.
Notice that this question, which may look like “splitting hairs” to natives (e.g. Evgeny’s reply above) is relevant to learners because the usual presentation of aspects (for example the conversation about the schoolboy wo делал/сделал his homework) seem to indicate that you can choose either one freely when both can be used.
However, when a foreign learner goes on to do that, (s)he finds that this is not always the case. We try to understand/confirm the difference and maybe get a theoretical explanation of why it is so (that last part, admittedly, is a bit nerdy of us).
Let me go through our “mental path” so you may understand why we’re interested:
The usual presentation of aspects suggests (as explained above) that in cases in which both aspects are applicable, you can choose one or another depending on what you want to stress.
When we actually do that, we’re often called on our particular choice by native speakers. The смотрел/посмотрел фильм and читал/начитал examples are typical examples. To give a precise example, conversations are usually like this (Josu88, in another thread, gave this example):
Foreign learner: Я начитал эту книгу
Native speaker: Ммммм. Tы имешь в виду “я читал книгу”
FL: What? I did actually read it cover to cover, Why can’t I say that? I thought I understood that.
Notice that: a)Telling us that they’re “interchangeable” here, does not help (Sergeny’s reply seems to be more in line with this observed behavior).
b) If it were just a question of “frequency” as you argue, the utterance would be accepted without objection.
That suggests to us that there’s an asymmetry of aspects in those cases.
The reactions of native speakers in this thread seem to indicate that there’s indeed an issue here and one that’s not very clear. Notice that native speakers sometimes say (you, +Bautov, Evgeny, …) that they’re interchangeable, sometimes that one is preferred (Sergeny, in the cases explained by Josu in another thread, …)
I presented a possible explanation of why, in these cases one of the tenses is perceived as “better” than the other and why the election is sometimes the opposite to what Latin-language speakers would use.
Markedness is just my particular proposal for an explanation.
We don’t have the verb “начитал” in this meaning. You have to say “прочитал”.
In fact, i don’t understand the word ‘markedness’ and I don’t like the abstract theoretical discussion about the language.
Every language is the PRACTICAL STUFF for the communication. That’s why I’m ready to explain every practicaд application of the language, but it’s boring for me to discuss about the language speculatively theoretically.
And I believe that every language has its own structures which can be partly similar to some patterns in another labnguage, bat alway only partly and never be identical.
+Evgueny.
Sorry for the mistake. Of course, I do understand that you don’t like this kind of topics. There are also many topics I’m not interested in. I thank you for your efforts so far and I also understand why you’d be unwilling to take further part in this conversation.
Of course structures are never identical across languages. This thread’s about what the difference is in this particular case. As I tried to explain, my interest arises from what I think it’s a practical matter but it’s true that the proposed explanation is theoretical in nature.
