A Contribution to Contrastive Grammar: on the Categoriality of Verbal Aspect, Tense, and Mood, as Well as on Functionality in Language

Peti-Stantić, Anita. (2018). A Contribution to Contrastive Grammar: on the Categoriality of Verbal Aspect, Tense, and Mood, as Well as on Functionality in Language. Croatica: časopis za hrvatski jezik, književnost i kulturu, 42(62). pp. 109-121. ISSN 1849-1111

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Abstract

This study investigates three distinct examples of the usage of verbal constructions in Slovenian and Croatian and offers an analysis of the metacognitive and analytic knowledge needed for the systematic development of a contrastive grammar of closely related languages. These grammatical constructions are: 1. the expression of future actions with the present tense of imperfective and perfective verbs, 2. the expression of the completed present and 3. the expression of imperative meaning with present, perfect, and future forms. An analysis of these examples points to two universal linguistic problems resulting from the organization of Slovene and Croatian languages. The first of these is the question of the so-called true meaning of any tense markers and the fact that the meaning usually seen as the ‘real’ one is not absolute, but actually depends on the speaker’s perspective from the present moment of speaking, which should be made explicit in any description. The second problem is the question of functionality, understood in the context of information structure, i.e. the possibility of expressing the relation to tense and mood in some other way, not only by means of verbal morphology (e.g., through adverbs or other lexico-grammatical means whose role remains to be investigated).

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