Why is the verb "to need" and "to observe" always imperfective in Slavic languages?

Question

I have been reading into Balto-Slavic languages and come across a problem. "To need" is always imperfective.

If I use the imperfective past verb, "to need," I am going to be still, presently needing something (because the verb is viewed internally).

That works fine, but what if I needed something in the past and I stopped needing it? If I stopped needing something, that would mean that the "process" of needing has concluded and I am viewing it from outside the duration of that action. This would require a perfective though, and almost none of the Slavic languages have them for that verb.

My reference words are наблюдать and нуждаться.

NOTE: I am talking about the perfective aspect NOT a perfect tense.

Answer 1

I believe you are asking this question because you have read that the perfective is used for completed actions. This is perfectly true. But it is important to understand in what sense they are completed.

Actions described by perfective verbs are completed in the sense that they stop because they have accomplished their object. For example:

Я открыл дверь. (I opened the door.)

This is a completed action. It is not simply discontinued as if it had ceased to be interesting and rewarding to the one doing it. It is completed because it has accomplished its purpose. Opening a door allows one to see what is on the other side and to pass through. If one is telling a story, saying that a door was opened moves the narrative ahead by one step. This ability to propel the narrative is what it means for a verb to be perfective.

The verbs you cite simply do not describe such a decisive action. For example "наблюдать" means "to observe" in the sense of "I observed how the birds raise their young." This is an extended passive activity which does not create new possibilities all by itself. Thus it is an imperfective idea.

The same applies to needing something as expressed by "нуждаться". Needing is not a real action it is more of a state. It is not a decisive action like opening a door or an act which one can carry to completion. On cannot "do a needing". One can only cease to need. Thus it too is an imperfective idea.

Answer 2

I know that this might sound as a blasphemy, but it doesn't make much sense splitting Slavic verbs along the "perfective" and "imperfective" line. This opposition is simply not built into the Slavic verb system.

This understanding of the verb aspect in Slavic languages is put forward in Comrie's work on the verb aspect:

Students of Russian and other Slavonic languages are familiar with the distinction between Perfective and Imperfective aspect, as in on pročital (Pfv.) and on čital (Ipfv.), both translatable into English as 'he read', although some idea of the difference can be given by translating the Imperfective as ' he was reading, he used to read '.

Speaking for Serbian (and I strongly suspect the same applies to Russian) Comrie's understanding of the contrast between "čital" and "pročital" must be erroneous on many levels. In the first place, understanding of "čital" as a strictly imperfective verb is untenable. We cannot possibly know whether "čital" receives perfective or imperfective reading without the context, simply because such opposition is not built into the language. What adding the morpheme "pro" to "čital" does is it changes an atelic verb into a telic one. Slavic (or at least Serbian) verbs contrast in terms of their telicity, but not in terms of perfectivity.

Similarly to Comrie, the authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language say this:

With perfective aspectuality, the situation is presented in its totality, as a complete whole; it is viewed, as it were, from the outside, without reference to any internal temporal structure or segmentation. The concept of complete whole is independent of time, so that perfective aspectuality is compatible with any time-sphere: past in He declared it a fake, present in I declare this meeting open, future in It is essential [that he declare everything he’s bought]. With imperfective aspectuality, the situation is not presented in its totality; it is viewed from within, with focus on some feature of the internal temporal structure or on some subinterval of time within the whole. In languages such as Russian there are distinct verb-forms whose basic meanings correspond closely to these two aspectualities, and these languages are therefore said to have perfective and imperfective aspect. English, of course, is not such a language: the simple present and preterite can both be used either perfectively or imperfectively.

I'd say it is on the contrary actually, the perfective / imperfective opposition is pretty much grammaticalized in English considering that in English we can clearly align "perfective" aspect with all (single) event verbs and imperfective (progressive) with the (be +) ing verb form.