"Nigdy nie pokazywałyście mi waszego samochodu."
Translation:You have never shown me your car.
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You have never shown me... oznacza nigdy nie POKAZAŁYŚCIE (POKAZALIŚCIE) mi... Chyba, że się mylę
Wszystkie te wersje są akceptowane. Nie da się niestety zmienić zdania które jest "oryginalne", chyba że kasując je z kursu i zastępując nowym.
Sentences like this make me realise that I don't really understand aspect in Polish. If I had had to guess, I would have used "pokazałyście" (perfective) here. Is the act of "showing" in Polish considered mainly imperfective, like an ongoing process, or...?
It's difficult especially in such sentences. I'd say that imperfective is usually default in negative sentences (it just never happened, so it's a whole ongoing process of not happening), but you can very easily imagine using perfective. My feel about this sentence would be like this:
"nie pokazywałyście" = your sisters start talking to you about their car, saying 'oh, you know how bad our car is, the mirrors are about to fall down and it has problems starting' and you say 'no, I don't know, you actually never shown it to me'.
"nie pokazałyście" = your sisters were supposed to show it to you, but somehow it didn't happen. So it's like a broken promise, a bit.
That's at least how I would interpret the difference.
So are you saying that in negative sentences Imperfective is usually used because Imperfective denotes an "incomplete" action, and by definition if it didn't happen it's incomplete? Well, I won't argue with you that that's how these verbs are used in Polish, but it seems to me that the intention of defining Imperfective as an "incomplete" action is not that it didn't take place, but rather that it's pending or in progress. Please correct me if I'm wrong, or if you have any other thoughts. This is just not quite adding up to me (and I thought I had a pretty good understanding of aspect). I understand that some things just are the way they are, and I can accept that if that's all there is in this case.
After another comment about this I asked around a bit, and it turns out that it's okay. The emphasis is different though. It suggests that 'you promised to show it to me and you have not', while the main version just says "that never happened".
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Hmm, that's about the same explanation as you gave us for the difference between Polish perfective and imperfective... Thus:
nigdy nie pokazywałyście – you have never shown
nigdy nie pokazałyście – you never have shown
It kinda seems so, but somehow I'm not so sure if we should put an = sign between those...
