On a more minor terminological quibble, why did you choose 'combinative' as an aspect name, after using semantically based names for the two primary aspects?
I would have thought that something like 'resultative' or some other semantically based name would have provided more congruence.
While 'perfect' can be defined and used as a name for the third Greek aspect, I can appreciate a desire to distance the name from the name of the first aspect, perfective.
And I can also appreciate that 'combinative' includes the complexity and the morphological double marking that developed in Greek. But singly marked stems were at the first stage core of development and a semantically-based name is able to group together variant morphologically based names and complex development.
Hence, my suggestion above. I wish we could have discussed more before your publication.
Greetings, Randall. Thanks for the comments, insightful as always.
On the "combinative/perfect/stative/resultative" terminology: yes, this is definitely still a work in progress, and yes, I wonder if a semantically focused term wouldn't be useful. My reasons for the move away from "perfect" were (a) as you noted, to differentiate between the "perfective aspect", but also, as we argue in the article, because it uses what is a historically tense-based category (perfect vs pluperfect) and transfers it to the aspectual category. Thus, we're caught in a bind, using "perfect" for the aspect label, "perfect" for "non-past perfect aspect", and "pluperfect" for the "past-perfect aspect". Better to have a distinct aspectual label, and avoid the double problems above. I believe we discussed this after the Runge-led ETS session last year, and wish we could have followed up further before the publication. Mike didn't love the term, for sure; I'm not sure that by the time of publication we'd found an adequate alternative.
For now, I'm treating the "combinative" label as a means of indicating an event that is in a sense perfective in its event, but with ongoing relevance temporally subsequent to the event. If we can find a better term that encapsulates the various semantic nuances of this aspect I'll be interested in seeing how we can continue to improve our terminology. Not perfect and not stative, to my points above and those in the article. Maybe resultative (semantic focused), maybe combinative (historical/morphological), maybe something else. In any case, here's hoping that we can "get it right"; I know I speak for my other authors as well, that we aren't committed to "being right".
I'll look forward to further conversations. And you're always welcome at my fire. Any plans on being in the States this fall? I'm planning on being in Idaho mid-October, fires allowing.