A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§4 Perfective and imperfective interpretations 43

The preterite and the perfect are different kinds of past tense: note that both She
went home and She has gone home locate her going home in past time.
Before we begin our survey of the four systems listed in [28] we need to intro­
duce an important semantic distinction that is relevant to all of them. We use situa­
tion as a cover term for the kinds of things that are described by a clause - actions
like publishing a novel, processes like growing tall, states like being a student, etc. -
and we distinguish two kinds of clause interpretation that look at situations in
different ways.

When a clause describes a situation in a way that considers it as a whole, in its

totality, without reference to any internal temporal structure or subdivision it

might have, we say that the clause has a perfective interpretation.

When a clause describes a situation in a way that makes reference to its internal

temporal structure or subdivisions, we say that the clause has an imperfective

interpretation.

The following examples illustrate the distinction:

[29] PERFECTIVE IMPERFECTIVE

a. She wrote a novel. b. She was writing a novel.

11 a. She spent last summer with her parents. b. She still lived with her parents.

The natural interpretation of [ia] is perfective: it simply describes an event that
took place in the past. Example rib], by contrast, has an imperfective interpreta­
tion: we are not concerned with the total event of her writing a novel, but with just
part of it, some part in the middle during the process of its composition. Note that
it does not follow from [ib] that she ever actually completed the novel. This clause
has progressive aspect, and clauses with this form are almost always interpreted
imperfective I y.
But imperfective interpretations are not confined to progressive clauses. While
[iia] is perfective -it talks about the summer as a whole - [iib] has an imperfec­
tive interpretation (despite not being in the progressive aspect). In [iib], just as in
rib], we are not concerned with any situation in its totality. The situation of her
living with her parents obtained at the time in the past that is being talked about,
and the still indicates that it had also obtained at an earlier time, and there is noth­
ing to say that it ended. She might still live with her parents now, at the time of
speaking.

Perfective vs perfect

It is important to distinguish the term 'perfective' from 'perfect', which we intro­
duced earlier in the chapter.

Perfect is the name of a grammatical category, a type of past tense;

Perfective applies, as far as English is concerned, to a kind of semantic interpre­

tation.