ASLiJM AND AFRICAN STUDES, 79, 2010, 1, 109-133 ON THE CATEGORY OF ASPECT IN BENGALI1 Anna RÁCOVÁ Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Klemensova 19, 813 64 Bratislava, Slovakia
[email protected] Although in somc languages the research of the category of aspect goes as far back as the end of 19th century,2 for the new Indian languages this is a relatively new problem. Attention started to be paid to aspcct only as late as in the middle of 20th century, and in this area up to now relatively little research has bccn done. This also applies for Bengali, where within investigating this verbal category several approaches have appeared. The aim of oitr article is to present a brief survey of the history of the research of aspect in Bengali as well as on the basis of existing findings and the analysis of Bengali texts to provide our own view of the means by which this semantic category is expressed in the Bengali language. Key words: category of aspect, category of tensc, pcrfectivity, imperfectivity. habituality, continuousness, perfectness, imperfectness I. Introduction 1.1 In addition to the fact that the speaker locates the action or state expressed by the verb with regard to the moment of speech into the past, the present or the future (doing so usually with the help of grammatical tense) and comments on the mode of the course of action or state (describing it for instance as sudden, regressive or completed), the speaker also expresses his/her subjective view of the action in the sense that he/she views it as if from the outside3 and then can 1 This study is published within the grant project VEGA 2/0153/09.