Les rapports temporels fondamentaux et leur expression linguistique: Contribution à la question de l'aspect et du temps By Erwin Koschmieder (review)

BOOK NOTICES 211 would be required. The variables selected for inclusion in the tests were power, social distance, and degree of imposition; they 'subsume all other variables and play a principled role in speech act behavior ' (4). The speech acts included were requests, refusals, and apologies. The latest version of the tests can be found in the appendices, which provide the full texts ofan open-ended discourse completion test, a multiple-choice test, a listening lab test, an oral interview test, a self-assessment discourse completion test, and a self-assessment interview. There can be little doubt that the work that has provided the subject matter of this progress report is important for the future of cross-cultural pragmatics. Unfortunately, no attention is paid to the work done by Anna Wierzbicka and her colleagues; their warning that cross-cultural pragmatics remains beset with terminological problems and rampant anglocentrism has not been heeded. [Bert Peeters, University of Tasmania.] Les rapports temporels fondamentaux et leur expression linguistique: Contribution à la question de l'aspect et du temps. By Erwin Koschmieder. Translated and edited by Didier Samain. (Histoire de la linguistique.) Villeneuve -d'Ascq (Nord): Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1996. Pp. lui, 122. 120FF. In 1929 Koschmieder published in German a cognitive examination of verbal tense and aspect under the title Zeitbezug und Sprache. Ein Beitrag zur Aspekt- und Tempusfrage ([Wissenschaftliche Grundfragen. Philosophische Abhandlungen, Heft IL] Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1929). He published a second edition of this work in 1971 with no revision aside from a bibliographic update ([Libelli, Band 329.] Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 1971). The volume considered here is the first French translation of K's work. Samain has added to it his own 47-page 'translator's preface' as well as a reworked bibliography (based on K's 1971 German edition), a subject index, and a name index. S has also interwoven additional explanatory footnotes with those footnotes—both bibliographic and substantive —already contained in K's original text. At a time when basic questions of verbal tense, aspect, and aktionsart had yet to be satisfactorily resolved , Zeitbezug und Sprache provided a number of persuasive explanations. As a Slavist, K was motivated primarily by a desire to elucidate verbal aspect in the contemporary Slavic languages. From Richard Hönigswald's Die Grundlagen der Denkpsychologie (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1921; [2nd edn.] Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925) he adapted both the concept of temporal place values (Zeitstellenwerte) and, more importantly, the concept of temporal directionality to a comprehensive definition of the perfective/imperfective aspectual opposition. According to K, the perfective aspect encoded by the verbal morphology of the contemporary Slavic languages is the grammatical expression of the temporal direction 'future —»past'. The Slavic imperfective aspect, in contrast, is the grammatical expression of the opposite temporal direction, 'past—»future' . K maintained that, because the physical flow of time proceeds in the direction 'past—»future' and the concrete present hie et nunc can be apprehended only in this way, all of the contemporary Slavic languages are alike in their exclusive instantiation of the imperfective aspect for the expression of continuous, or eventive, actions (i.e. praesens actualis, including states). Looking back in time, i.e. regarding an action in the direction future —»past, explains why the semantics of the Slavic perfective aspect encompasses the notion of a single, successfully completed action (the individual Slavic languages differing from each other in their instantiation of the perfective aspect with respect, for the most part, to iterativity and various noneventive [noncontinuous] presents). K found support for his notion of temporal directionality in its applicability to putatively temporal phenomena in other, non-Slavic languages. For example , K demonstrated that what were still viewed in the 1920s as verbal tenses in various Semitic languages are in fact verbal aspects. Thus, the so-called preterite tense represented in Akkadian by iksud and present/future tense represented by ikasad are, respectively , perfective- and imperfective-ASPEcr forms instead. The same aspectual opposition is represented in Hebrew by perfect qatal and imperfect jiqtôl. K also regarded the Ancient Greek aorist as an aspectual, rather than a temporal, form. For K the Greek aorist was a perfective-aspect form which, like Slavic perfective verbs...