Timeline for Does English have [ inchoative aspect ]?
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| Nov 17, 2016 at 12:24 | comment | added | Luís Henrique | @user6726 - [get V-ing] is grammatical, but isn't morphological. I suppose this is the point. There is no inflexion for inchoative in English; other languages do have such inflections, e.g., Portuguese "entendia" vs "entendeu". | |
| Nov 12, 2016 at 22:39 | history | edited | Gaston Ümlaut | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 7, 2016 at 19:33 | comment | added | amI | Perfect, progressive, inchoative, etc. are all expressed using serial (control) verbs. Perfect and progressive are well behaved and their control verbs ('have' and 'be') are called 'auxiliaries'. 'Get' (or often 'become') can replace 'be' as the auxiliary for both progressive ("get going") and passive ("get eaten"). Control verbs often have nuance between 'verb-ing' and 'to verb' ("He is/gets going" vs "He has/is/gets to go"). Some even imply passive ("It needs washing" = "It needs to be washed", instead of "It needs being washed"). | |
| Aug 31, 2016 at 2:26 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | @user6726 it is of course a grammatical construction but as jlawler points out it is used to express a variety of meanings. There may be some dialectal variation in this, for me it seems the core semantics of the "get V-ing" construction is more hortatory or inceptive but certainly it is also often inchoative. | |
| Aug 30, 2016 at 14:31 | comment | added | jlawler | Get is a very common source of inchoative sense, but it's not totally productive and it's certainly not paradigmatic. There are dozens of ways to signal inchoation (and causativity, for that matter), but there is no one single way to do it. This is akin to "future 'tense'" in English; we can express the future in dozens of ways, but there is no single "future tense". | |
| Aug 30, 2016 at 13:32 | comment | added | Teusz | Perhaps it is reductionist, but I think aspect is usually part of verbal inflectional paradigms. At least in most cases. The get V-ing structure is not inflectional. | |
| Aug 29, 2016 at 23:36 | comment | added | user6726 | Why do you not consider the "get V-ing" construction to be a grammatical construction? | |
| Aug 29, 2016 at 23:11 | history | answered | Gaston Ümlaut | CC BY-SA 3.0 |