Listy o aspekcie

Letters on aspectThe paper presents the correspondence between the author and professor Stanisław Karolak concerning the role of pragmatic factors such as illocutionary force (i.e. an assertion, a negation, an order, a promise ecc.) in perfective/imperfective aspect choice in Russian and Polish.According to the author’s aspect theory, the occurrence of the perfective verb form is determined by illocutionary force that bears on the part of the verb meaning that consists of the change-of-state and its result. That is why, when illocutionary force is focused on other parts of verb meaning, the accomplished facts are expressed by the imperfective.In his letters Stanisław Karolak expresses a different view: for him assertion is a part of semantics, and he disagrees with taking into consideration pragmatic mechanisms in order to account for aspect variation.