[ Footnote 73: ] Such as person class, animal class, instrument class, augmentative class.
[ Footnote 74: ] A term borrowed from Slavic grammar. It indicates the lapse of action, its nature from the standpoint of continuity. Our “cry” is indefinite as to aspect, “be crying” is durative, “cry put” is momentaneous, “burst into tears” is inceptive, “keep crying” is continuative, “start in crying” is durative-inceptive, “cry now and again” is iterative, “cry out every now and then” or “cry in fits and starts” is momentaneous-iterative. “To put on a coat” is momentaneous, “to wear a coat” is resultative. As our examples show, aspect is expressed in English by all kinds of idiomatic turns rather than by a consistently worked out set of grammatical forms. In many languages aspect is of far greater formal significance than tense, with which the naïve student is apt to confuse it.
[ Footnote 75: ] By “modalities” I do not mean the matter of fact statement, say, of negation or uncertainty as such, rather their implication in terms of form. There are languages, for instance, which have as elaborate an apparatus of negative forms for the verb as Greek has of the optative or wish-modality.
[ Footnote 76: ] Compare [page 97].
[ Footnote 77: ] It is because of this classification of experience that in many languages the verb forms which are proper, say, to a mythical narration differ from those commonly used in daily intercourse. We leave these shades to the context or content ourselves with a more explicit and roundabout mode of expression, e.g., “He is dead, as I happen to know,” “They say he is dead,” “He must be dead by the looks of things.”
[ Footnote 78: ] We say “I sleep” and “I go,” as well as “I kill him,” but “he kills me.” Yet me of the last example is at least as close psychologically to I of “I sleep” as is the latter to I of “I kill him.” It is only by form that we can classify the “I” notion of “I sleep” as that of an acting subject. Properly speaking, I am handled by forces beyond my control when I sleep just as truly as when some one is killing me. Numerous languages differentiate clearly between active subject and static subject (I go and I kill him as distinct from I sleep, I am good, I am killed) or between transitive subject and intransitive subject (I kill him as distinct from I sleep, I am good, I am killed, I go). The intransitive or static subjects may or may not be identical with the object of the transitive verb.
[ Footnote 79: ] Ultimately, also historical—say, age to “act that (one).”
[ Footnote 80: ] For with in the sense of “against,” compare German wider “against.”
[ Footnote 81: ] Cf. Latin ire “to go”; also our English idiom “I have to go,” i.e., “must go.”
[ Footnote 82: ] In Chinese no less than in English.