Tense, aspect and the organization of Polish narrative

Abstract

Aspect in Slavic has traditionally been described as a perfective-imperfective opposition. We show that a binary description of Polish aspect does not suffice morphologically, lexically, or semantically. We propose a tripartite system which allows for the derivation of perfectives from imperfectives and of imperfectives from both perfectives and imperfectives. We then show how the distribution of tense-aspect (T/A) forms organizes oral narrative in Polish, using a spontaneous text produced by a native speaker. T/A choices provide coherence in discourse blocks, letting the speaker keep main and substories distinct and permitting viewpoint shifts in narrative that would otherwise be confusing.