On cognition-based notions in compositional aspect incompatible with traditional grammar

Abstract

Compositional aspect is an extremely important cross-language and universal language phenomenon discovered by Henk Verkuyl, a Dutch linguist and logician, in 1971, published a year later. Compositional aspect appears to exist in all natural languages, and proof is being accumulated lately in favor of this thesis. In contrast to verbal aspect as found in the Slavic languages, Greek, Georgian, Chinese, etc., where it resides in verbs as lexical entries but is grammaticalized, compositional aspect exists at the level of the sentence. The paper discusses some major notions that, on the one hand, underlie the correct understanding of compositional aspect and, on the other, constitute at least some of the reasons for the absence of the article-aspect interplay, an important phenomenon, in English grammars and in the literature on English language teaching. Publications in these two fields are practically silent about a phenomenon that has otherwise been discussed in theoretical linguistics for decades. Theoretical linguistics itself, although cognizant of the article-aspect interplay, also abounds in misconceptualizations about aspect in general, reigning in it from as early as when compositional aspect was discovered. English grammars and the overall literature on English language teaching continue to remain silent on the article-aspect interplay even lately, despite the appearance in recent years of a couple of publications – successfully addressing the issue but isolated, including two revolutionary papers dealing with articles, determiners, quantifiers and similar elements taking part in the compositional effectuation of aspect.