Abstract
Latin aspect, even the question of its mere existence, is a matter of a long heated debate. However, there appears to be some agreement that "aspect" refers to an atemporal category that defines the view of the speaker on the described situation.
Most scholars agree on aspect being a universal category that differs in the level of its grammaticalization in individual languages, similarly to tempus. There are languages whose aspect is fully grammaticalized in their verbal system; with morphological aspect embedded in the system of past tenses; with aspect in their lexical plan; and even languages in which the aspect is not grammaticalized at all, but coded in the whole sentence structure.
As for Latin, most of the scholars highlight the contrast in the system of past tenses (imperfect and perfect tense) as the aspectual one. However, not much attention was paid to the aspectual value of the complements of the verb as well as other constituents of the sentence (cf.
Haverling 2000: 14: "It is in other words the whole constellation that expresses an aspecutal value of some kind, not the verb alone".) No systematic research on the various aspectual elements and their hierarchy has been done. In the present paper, only one aspectual element - the preverb ex- - is handled.
The analyzed data come from the complete excerption of all present, future, imperfect and active perfect indicative forms of the verbs with the prefix ex- from the texts from Plautus to Cicero. The theoretical premises for the value of the imperfect and present tenses are: imperfect and present indicatives denote 1. durativity, 2. conativity, 3. iterativity, 4. progressivity (?).
Conativity is limited to inherently telic verbs, that denote the heading towards a telos, aim, result. The inherently atelic predicates do not allow the conative interpretation.
On the contrary, durativity is strongly connected with inherently atelic predicates. As for the iterativity, it is not limited to either of these groups.
On the given data, I verify the hypothesis, that 1. the verbs with the prefix ex- are inherently telic, and as such they only allow the iterative or conative interpretation of their indicative imperfect and present forms; 2. their simple, unprefixed forms can be inherently atelic, and therefore do allow the durative interpretation of the forementioned forms. I.e. the carrier of the telicity is the prefix and not the stem of the verb, or, the aspectual meaning of the prefixed verb is established from the combination of the stem and the prefix, with the latter having bigger weight.
The present study is just the first part of a much broader project planned for the future whose aim is to isolate the individual elements of which the aspectual value in Latin consists and to state their hierarchy and relations.