On the systematic misconceptualization of aspect East and West leading aspectology astray
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31558/1815-3070.2025.49.1Keywords:
aspectology, theory of compositional aspect, compositional aspect, verbal aspect, biaspectuality, Soviet and post-Soviet misconceptions of aspectAbstract
Aspect is no longer a mystery but aspectology abounds in misconceptualizations and wrong attempts at explanations of both verbal aspect and compositional aspect. Aspectology needs a radical reform to get rid of Soviet, post-Soviet and Russian political hallucinations and dogmatism which lead not only Slavic and Ukrainian research astray but sometimes even misguide Western researchers lacking the ability to assess critically Russian linguistics – the latter thought by Russians to be “analogue-free” like the “Russian soul” and the “Russian world”. The understanding of everything Russian as “invariably unique” was tacitly transferred to linguistics and underlies the drastic systematic absence in Soviet linguistics of research using modern theoretical frameworks in problem spheres such as (inter alia): compositional aspect, biaspectuality, article-aspect interplay, case-aspect interplay, nominal determination, including the complex mechanisms of explication in Slavic languages with no articles of definiteness and indefiniteness, specificity and nonspecificity, genericity and non-genericity. Soviet, post-Soviet and Russian linguistics have exercised a detrimental impact on Slavic and especially Ukrainian linguistics, whereby aspectology has suffered severely. But wrong interpretations of aspect, especially compositional aspect, are also abundant among the world linguistic community – and these may be by-products of the thwarted development of aspectology in the East. The paper deals on an equal footing with deviant interpretations of aspect – whether verbal or compositional, whether from the East or the West, and aims at exposing the major misconceptualizations and wrong interpretations, in order to clear the way for a radical reform in aspectology.
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