The authors do not offer proof that the articles in languages like English do not impact aspect

What is it about?

Fleischhauer and Czardybon follow a completely wrong approach to aspect, known as the incremental-theme approach, an atemporal one, according to which in sentences such as "The child ate the apple" the NP "the apple" is a spatial entity which, when eaten to the end, brings about a Cinderella-like metamorphosis: the spatial feature boundedness of "the apple" miraculously turns into temporal boundedness in the VP referent, whereby "ate" receives a perfective interpretation. This childishly naive thesis, maintained in hundreds of publications belonging to the so-called incremental-theme trend and leading aspectology into a dead end with its negligence of the temporality of situation participants, is analyzed in greater depth and repudiated also later, in Kabakciev, K, 2019, On the history of compositional aspect: vicissitudes, issues, prospects. Athens Journal of Philology, 6,3. The crucial mistake by Fleischhauer and Czardybon is that they not only ignore the temporality of situation participants, they also completely bypass: (1) the role of the subject in the explication of aspect in compositional aspect terms, a fundamental concept of the theory of compositional aspect; (2) the fact that even a follower of the incremental-theme trend, Krifka M, 1992, Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal constitution, IA Sag, A Szabolcsi, Lexical Matters. Stanford, CA, had earlier honestly admitted the impossibility to explain the perfectivity of sentences such as "The child ate the apple" through a spatial feature of the apple - because if "the apple" in such sentences undergoes a change, the subject "the child" does not. In a temporal approach to the problem, proposed almost two decades earlier (Kabakčiev K, 2000, Aspect in English: a "common-sense" view of the interplay between verbal and nominal referents. Dordrecht: Kluwer), such a problem simply does not exist: because both subject and object are interpreted as temporal entities - deep in the speaker's/hearer's mind. The authors also completely fail to see why two theories, not only one, Kabakciev's and Leiss' (Leiss E, 2000, Artikel und Aspekt. Die grammatischen Muster von Definitheit, Berlin: de Gruyter), dealing with data from completely different languages in both synchronic and diachronic terms, coincide in their conclusions that article and aspect are extremely closely interrelated in language structure - across very different languages and across millennia.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The paper (response) is important because it explains one of the major wrong paths of analysis (in the so-called incremental-theme trend) of compositional aspect phenomena, ultimately leading to a thwarted picture of the cross-language and universal phenomenon of aspect.