Abstract
Aspect is a universal semantic category that varies in the level and means of its grammaticalization. The bibliography regarding aspect in Latin is immense: there are theories stating that nothing like aspect can be identified in Latin, theories viewing the opposition imperfectum versus perfectum as an aspectual one, theories working with preverbs and/or infixes like -sc- as aspectual markers etc.
There are three main reasons why the discussion on the matter has never led to a conclusion: 1. The concept of markedness tends to be ignored. 2.
The fact that in different languages, different members of the aspectual opposition are (un)marked. 3. All the above mentioned theories perceive the aspect purely as a verbal characteristic.
As the recent works in the field of aspectology convincingly show, the aspect is encoded in the whole sentence and its elements - in the subject/object and its (un)specified quantity, in adverbials, etc. There are other constituents of the sentence that have obvious influence on the aspect of the whole utterance, e.g. definite and indefinite articles of the subject or object or cases or and morphemes with originally locative or partitive meaning (as in Finnish or German).
FILIP (1999: 62-69) isolated even more markers that cause the aspect shift, as for example adverbials, verbal mood, etc. It is quite easy to test the influence of the various aspectual markers in English, German, and other languages that have native speakers.
However, the theory of compositional aspect has never been tested for Latin. The present paper discusses the possible aspectual markers (preverbs, adverbials, (un)specified quantity of the subject or object, etc.) and identifies their mutual relationships in Latin.
In this paper, I point out the importance of viewing aspect in Latin from the compositional point of view in order to understand properly the manifestation of aspect in the Latin discourse.