In
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
, aspect is a
grammatical category
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusiv ...
that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a
verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
, extends over time.
Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as
bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him").
Imperfective aspect
The imperfective ( abbreviated or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a ge ...
is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people").
Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish
states and ongoing actions (
continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions (
habitual aspect).
Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the
perfect aspect
The perfect tense or aspect ( abbreviated or ) is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. ...
, which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten".
Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; some (such as
Standard German; see
below) do not make any. The marking of aspect is often conflated with the marking of
tense and
mood (see
tense–aspect–mood
Tense–aspect–mood (commonly abbreviated ) or tense–modality–aspect (abbreviated as ) is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different la ...
). Aspectual distinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
and the
Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
, for example, the perfective–imperfective distinction is marked in the
past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some ha ...
, by the division between
preterites and
imperfect
The imperfect ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to ...
s. Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
; here verbs often occur in pairs, with two related verbs being used respectively for imperfective and perfective meanings.
The concept of grammatical aspect should not be confused with
perfect and
imperfect
The imperfect ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to ...
''verb forms''; the meanings of the latter terms are somewhat different, and in some languages, the common names used for verb forms may not follow the actual aspects precisely.
Basic concept
History
The Indian linguist
Yaska (c. 7th century BCE) dealt with grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that are processes (''bhāva''), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (''mūrta''). This is the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal.
Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages also showed an interest in aspect, but the idea did not enter into the modern Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century via the study of the grammar of the
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
. The earliest use of the term recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...
dates from 1853.
[
]
Modern usage
Aspect is often confused with the closely related concept of
tense, because they both convey information about time. While tense relates the time of
referent to some other time, commonly the speech event, aspect conveys other temporal information, such as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense refers to ''temporally when'' while aspect refers to ''temporally how''. Aspect can be said to describe the texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single point of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence of discrete points in time, etc., whereas tense indicates its location in time.
For example, consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". All are in the
present tense
The present tense (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present ...
, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence (''eat'', ''am'', and ''have''). Yet since they differ in aspect each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present.
Grammatical aspect is a ''formal'' property of a
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
, distinguished through overt
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
, derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required
markers of those aspects. For example, the
K'iche' language K'iche', K'ichee', or Quiché may refer to:
* K'iche' people of Guatemala, a subgroup of the Maya
* K'iche' language, a Maya language spoken by the K'iche' people
** Classical K'iche' language, the 16th century form of the K'iche' language
* Kʼich ...
spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes ''k''- and ''x''- to mark incompletive and completive aspect;
[Pye, Clifton (2001). "The Acquisition of Finiteness in K'iche' Maya". ''BUCLD 25: Proceedings of the 25th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development'', pp. 645–656. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.] Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
has the aspect markers -''le'' 了, -''zhe'' 着, ''zài''- 在, and -''guò'' 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects,
[Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson (1981). "Aspect". ''Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar''. Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 184–237.] and also marks aspect with
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s;
and English marks the
continuous aspect
The continuous and progressive aspects (abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
In the grammars of many ...
with the verb ''to be'' coupled with
present participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
and the
perfect with the verb ''to have'' coupled with
past participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
. Even languages that do not mark aspect
morphologically or through
auxiliary verb
An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a ...
s, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other
syntactic constructions.
Grammatical aspect is distinguished from
lexical aspect
In linguistics, the lexical aspect or Aktionsart (, plural ''Aktionsarten'' ) of a verb is part of the way in which that verb is structured in relation to time. For example, the English verbs ''arrive'' and ''run'' differ in their lexical aspect ...
or ''aktionsart'', which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the situation that the verb describes.
Common aspectual distinctions
The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is between perfective aspect and imperfective aspect. This is the basic aspectual distinction in the Slavic languages.
It semantically corresponds to the distinction between the
morphological forms known respectively as the
aorist and imperfect in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the
simple past
The simple past, past simple or past indefinite, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English ...
(''passé simple'') and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin (from the Latin ''perfectus'', meaning "completed").
Essentially, the perfective aspect looks at an event as a complete action, while the imperfective aspect views an event as the process of unfolding or a repeated or habitual event (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuous aspect for events of short-term duration and to habitual aspect for longer terms).
For events of short durations in the past, the distinction often coincides with the distinction in the English language between the simple past "X-ed," as compared to the progressive "was X-ing". Compare "I wrote the letters this morning" (i.e. finished writing the letters: an action completed) and "I was writing letters this morning" (the letters may still be unfinished).
In describing longer time periods, English needs context to maintain the distinction between the habitual ("I called him often in the past" – a habit that has no point of completion) and perfective ("I called him once" – an action completed), although the construct "used to" marks both habitual aspect and past tense and can be used if the aspectual distinction otherwise is not clear.
Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, ''savoir'' and ''saber''. This is also true when the sense of verb "to know" is "to know somebody", in this case opposed in aspect to the verb "to meet" (or even to the construction "to get to know"). These correspond to imperfect and perfect forms of ''conocer'' in Spanish, and ''connaître'' in French. In German, on the other hand, the distinction is also lexical (as in English) through verbs ''kennen'' and ''kennenlernen'', although the semantic relation between both forms is much more straightforward since ''kennen'' means "to know" and ''lernen'' means "to learn".
Aspect vs. tense
The
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, E ...
combine the concept of aspect with the concept of
tense. Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and
n the past tensehabitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of
perfective vs. imperfective that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly. One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten?" and "Did you eat?".
In European languages, rather than locating an event time, the way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the process itself".
[Bernard Comrie, 1976. ''Aspect''. Cambridge University Press] English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc.
In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the very frequently used
aorist, though a functional
preterite in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moods is used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. – I see (present); – I saw (aorist); – I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect).
Also Turkish has a same/similar aspect such as "Görmüş bulunuyorum/durumdayım", where "görmüş" means "having seen" and "bulunuyorum/durumdayım" means "I am in the state".
In many Sino-Tibetan languages, such as
Mandarin
Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to:
Language
* Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country
** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China
** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...
, verbs lack grammatical markers of tense, but are rich in aspect (Heine, Kuteva 2010, p. 10). Markers of aspect are attached to verbs to indicate aspect. Event time is inferred through use of these aspectual markers, along with optional inclusion of adverbs.
Lexical vs. grammatical aspect
There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and
lexical aspect
In linguistics, the lexical aspect or Aktionsart (, plural ''Aktionsarten'' ) of a verb is part of the way in which that verb is structured in relation to time. For example, the English verbs ''arrive'' and ''run'' differ in their lexical aspect ...
. Other terms for the contrast ''lexical vs. grammatical'' include: ''situation vs. viewpoint'' and ''inner vs. outer''. Lexical aspect, also known as aktionsart, is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect. Typical distinctions are between states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a picture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or
semelfactive
In linguistics, semelfactive is a class of aktionsart or lexical aspect (verb aspects that reflect the temporal flow of the denoted event, lexically incorporated into the verb's root itself rather than grammatically expressed by inflections or aux ...
, events ("I sneezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used in English with a prepositional ''for''-phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called ''
Aktionsart
In linguistics, the lexical aspect or Aktionsart (, plural ''Aktionsarten'' ) of a verb is part of the way in which that verb is structured in relation to time. For example, the English verbs ''arrive'' and ''run'' differ in their lexical aspec ...
'', especially by German and
Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in
Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...
.
One of the factors in situation aspect is
telicity
In linguistics, telicity (; ) is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as having a specific endpoint. A verb or verb phrase with this property is said to be ''telic''; if the situation it describes is ''not'' he ...
. Telicity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb ''phrase''. Achievements, accomplishments and
semelfactive
In linguistics, semelfactive is a class of aktionsart or lexical aspect (verb aspects that reflect the temporal flow of the denoted event, lexically incorporated into the verb's root itself rather than grammatically expressed by inflections or aux ...
s have telic situation aspect, while states and activities have atelic situation aspect.
The other factor in situation aspect is duration, which is also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments, states, and activities have duration, while achievements and semelfactives do not.
Indicating aspect
In some languages, aspect and time are very clearly separated, making them much more distinct to their speakers. There are a number of languages that mark aspect much more saliently than time. Prominent in this category are Chinese and
American Sign Language, which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect to time. In other language groups, for example in most modern
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
(except
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
and some Indo-Aryan languages like
Hindi
Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
), aspect has become almost entirely conflated, in the verbal morphological system, with time.
In
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, aspect is more salient than tense in narrative. Russian, like other Slavic languages, uses different lexical entries for the different aspects, whereas other languages mark them
morphologically, and still others with
auxiliaries
Auxiliaries are support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties such as garrison troops, ...
(e.g., English).
In
Hindi
Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
, the aspect marker is overtly separated from the tense/mood marker.
Periphrastic
In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one in ...
Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense/mood marker.
In
literary Arabic ( ''al-fuṣḥā'') the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammarians whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both. The past verb ( ''al-fiʿl al-māḍī'') denotes an event ( ''ḥadaṯ'') completed in the past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, ''waṣala'', "arrived", indicates that arrival occurred in the past without saying anything about the present status of the arriver – maybe they stuck around, maybe they turned around and left, etc. – nor about the aspect of the past event except insofar as completeness can be considered aspectual. This past verb is clearly similar if not identical to the Greek aorist, which is considered a tense but is more of an aspect marker. In the Arabic, aorist aspect is the logical consequence of past tense. By contrast, the "Verb of Similarity" ( ''al-fiʿl al-muḍāriʿ''), so called because of its resemblance to the active participial noun, is considered to denote an event in the present or future without committing to a specific aspectual sense beyond the incompleteness implied by the tense: (''yaḍribu'', he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.). Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting ''amr'', command or imperative, which is traditionally considered as denoting future events.) To explicitly mark aspect, Arabic uses a variety of lexical and syntactic devices.
Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. One major change from al-fuṣḥā is the use of a prefix particle ( ''bi'' in Egyptian and Levantine dialects—though it may have a slightly different range of functions in each dialect) to explicitly mark progressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: , ''bi-yiktib'', he is now writing, writes all the time, etc.
Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The
prospective aspect
In linguistics, the prospective aspect ( abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect describing an event that occurs subsequent to a given reference time.Matthews, P. H. (1997) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University P ...
is a combination of tense and aspect that indicates the action is in preparation to take place. The inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g.
Esperanto uses ''
ek-'', e.g. ''Mi ekmanĝas'', "I am beginning to eat".) and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state (''The flowers started blooming'') or the start of an action (''He started running''). Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative.
Important qualifications:
*Although the perfective is often thought of as representing a "momentary action", this is not strictly correct. It can equally well be used for an action that took time, as long as it is ''conceived of'' as a unit, with a clearly defined start and end, such as "Last summer I visited France".
*Grammatical aspect represents a formal distinction encoded in the grammar of a language. Although languages that are described as having imperfective and perfective aspects agree in most cases in their use of these aspects, they may not agree in every situation. For example:
**Some languages have additional grammatical aspects. Spanish and Ancient Greek, for example, have a
perfect (not the same as the perfective), which refers to a state resulting from a previous action (also described as a previous action with relevance to a particular time, or a previous action viewed from the perspective of a later time). This corresponds (roughly) to the "have X-ed" construction in English, as in "I have recently eaten". Languages that lack this aspect (such as Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish) often use the past perfective to render the present perfect (compare the roughly synonymous English sentences "Have you eaten yet?" and "Did you eat yet?").
**In some languages, the formal representation of aspect is optional, and can be omitted when the aspect is clear from context or does not need to be emphasized. This is the case, for example, in Mandarin Chinese, with the perfective suffix ''le'' and (especially) the imperfective ''zhe''.
**For some verbs in some languages, the difference between perfective and imperfective conveys an additional meaning difference; in such cases, the two aspects are typically translated using separate verbs in English. In Greek, for example, the imperfective sometimes adds the notion of "try to do something" (the so-called ''conative imperfect''); hence, the same verb, in the imperfective (present or imperfect) and aorist, respectively, is used to convey ''look'' and ''see'', ''search'' and ''find'', ''listen'' and ''hear''. (For example, ἠκούομεν (''ēkouomen'', "we listened") vs. ἠκούσαμεν (''ēkousamen'', "we heard").) Spanish has similar pairs for certain verbs, such as (imperfect and preterite, respectively) ''sabía'' ("I knew") vs. ''supe'' ("I found out"), ''podía'' ("I was able to") vs. ''pude'' ("I succeeded (in doing something)"), ''quería'' ("I wanted to") vs. ''quise'' ("I tried to"), and ''no quería'' ("I did not want to") vs. ''no quise'' ("I refused (to do something)"). Such differences are often highly language-specific.
By language
Germanic languages
English
The
English tense–aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses,
past
The past is the set of all events that occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience ...
and
non-past, the latter of which is also known as the ''present-future'' or, more commonly and less formally, simply the ''present''. No marker of a distinct future tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity of an event may be expressed through the use of the
auxiliary verb
An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a ...
s "
will" and "
shall", by a non-past form plus an
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
, as in "tomorrow we will go to New York City", or by some other means. Past is distinguished from non-past, in contrast, with internal modifications of the verb. These two tenses may be modified further for
progressive aspect
The continuous and progressive aspects ( abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
In the grammars of many ...
(also called ''continuous'' aspect), for the
perfect, or for both. These two aspectual forms are also referred to as BE +ING and HAVE +EN, respectively, which avoids what may be unfamiliar terminology.
Aspects of the present tense:
*
Present simple
The simple present, present simple or present indefinite is one of the verb forms associated with the present tense in modern English. It is commonly referred to as a tense, although it also encodes certain information about aspect in addition ...
(not progressive, not perfect): "I eat"
*
Present progressive
The present continuous, also called the present progressive or present imperfect, is a verb form used in modern English that combines the present tense with the continuous aspect. It is formed by the present tense form of be and the present part ...
(progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
*
Present perfect
The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and perfect aspect that is used to express a past event that has present consequences. The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar to refer to forms like " ...
(not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
*
Present perfect progressive
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:
* Finite verb forms such as ''go'', ''goes'' and ''went''
* Nonfinite forms such as ''(to) go'', ''going'' and ''gone''
* Combinations of s ...
(progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"
(While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfect as a past tense, it relates the action to the present time. One cannot say of someone now deceased that they "have eaten" or "have been eating". The present auxiliary implies that they are in some way ''present'' (alive), even when the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).)
Aspects of the past tense:
*
Past simple
The simple past, past simple or past indefinite, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English ...
(not progressive, not perfect): "I ate"
*
Past progressive
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:
* Finite verb forms such as ''go'', ''goes'' and ''went''
* Nonfinite forms such as ''(to) go'', ''going'' and ''gone''
* Combinations of s ...
(progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
*
Past perfect
The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time i ...
(not progressive, perfect): "I had eaten"
*
Past perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I had been eating"
Aspects can also be marked on
non-finite forms of the verb: "(to) be eating" (
infinitive
Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...
with progressive aspect), "(to) have eaten" (infinitive with perfect aspect), "having eaten" (
present participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
or
gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiab ...
with perfect aspect), etc. The perfect infinitive can further be governed by
modal verbs
A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the b ...
to express various meanings, mostly combining modality with past reference: "I should have eaten" etc. In particular, the modals ''will'' and ''shall'' and their subjunctive forms ''would'' and ''should'' are used to combine future or hypothetical reference with aspectual meaning:
*
Simple future,
simple conditional: "I will eat", "I would eat"
*
Future progressive,
conditional progressive: "I will be eating", "I would be eating"
*
Future perfect
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as ''will have finished'' in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." ...
,
conditional perfect The conditional perfect is a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect. A typical example is the English ''would have written''.Gail Stein, ''Webster's New World Spanish Grammar Handbook'', John Wiley & Sons, 20 ...
: "I will have eaten", "I would have eaten"
*
Future perfect progressive,
conditional perfect progressive: "I will have been eating", "I would have been eating"
The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:
:I was walking down the road when I met Michael Jackson's lawyer. (Speaker viewpoint in middle of action)
:I have traveled widely, but I have never been to
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
. (Speaker viewpoint at end of action)
But they can have other
illocutionary forces or additional modal components:
:You are being stupid now. (You are doing it deliberately)
:You are not having chocolate with your sausages! (I forbid it)
:I am having lunch with Mike tomorrow. (It is decided)
English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. ''
Used to
The habitual aspect is a form of expression connoting repetition or continuous existence of a state of affairs. In standard English, for the present time there is no special grammatical marker for the habitual; the simple present is used, as in '' ...
'' + VERB is a past
habitual, as in "I used to go to school," and ''
going to
The ''going-to'' future is a grammatical construction used in English to refer to various types of future occurrences. It is made using appropriate forms of the expression ''to be going to''.Fleischman, Suzanne, ''The Future in Thought and Langua ...
/ gonna'' + VERB is a
prospective, a future situation highlighting current intention or expectation, as in "I'm going to go to school next year."
African American Vernacular English
The aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as
African-American Vernacular English (see for example
habitual be
Habitual ''be'', also called invariant ''be'', is the use of an uninflected ''be'' in African-American English (AAE), Caribbean English and certain dialects of Hiberno-English to mark habitual or extended actions in place of the Standard Engl ...
), and of
creoles based on English vocabulary, such as
Hawaiian Creole English
Hawaiian Pidgin (alternately, Hawaiʻi Creole English or HCE, known locally as Pidgin) is an English-based creole language spoken in Hawaiʻi. An estimated 600,000 residents of Hawaii speak Hawaiian Pidgin natively and 400,000 speak it as a sec ...
, are quite different from those of standard English, and often reflect a more elaborate paradigm of aspectual distinctions (often at the expense of tense). The following table, appearing originally in Green (2002) shows the possible aspectual distinctions in AAVE in their prototypical, negative and
stressed/emphatic affirmative forms:
German vernacular and colloquial
Although
Standard German does not have aspects, many
Upper German languages
Upper German (german: Oberdeutsch ) is a family of High German dialects spoken primarily in the southern German-speaking area ().
History
In the Old High German time, only Alemannic and Bairisch are grouped as Upper German. In the Middle High ...
, all
West Central German
West Central German (german: Westmitteldeutsch) belongs to the Central, High German dialect family of German. Its dialects are Franconian and comprise the parts of the Rhinelandic continuum located south of the Benrath line isogloss, including ...
languages, and some more vernacular German languages do make one aspectual distinction, and so do the colloquial languages of many regions, the so-called German
regiolect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
s. While officially discouraged in schools and seen as 'bad language', local English teachers like the distinction, because it corresponds well with the English
continuous form. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb ''sein'' ("to be") followed by the preposition "am" and the infinitive, or the nominalized verb. The latter two are phonetically indistinguishable; in writing, capitalization differs: "Ich war am essen" vs. "Ich war am Essen" (I was eating, compared to the Standard German approximation: "Ich war beim Essen"); yet these forms are not standardized and thus are relatively infrequently written down or printed, even in quotations or direct speech.
In the Tyrolean and other Bavarian regiolect the prefix *da can be found, which form perfective aspects. "I hu's gleant" (Ich habe es gelernt = I learnt it) vs. "I hu's daleant" (*Ich habe es DAlernt = I succeeded in learning).
Dutch
In
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
(a
West Germanic language
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages (the others being the North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages). The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into ...
), two types of
continuous form are used. Both types are considered Standard Dutch.
The first type is very similar to the non-standard German type. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb ''zijn'' ("to be"), followed by ''aan het'' and the
gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiab ...
(which in Dutch matches the infinitive). For example:
*
Present progressive
The present continuous, also called the present progressive or present imperfect, is a verb form used in modern English that combines the present tense with the continuous aspect. It is formed by the present tense form of be and the present part ...
: ''Ik ben aan het werken'' ("I am working")
*
Past progressive
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:
* Finite verb forms such as ''go'', ''goes'' and ''went''
* Nonfinite forms such as ''(to) go'', ''going'' and ''gone''
* Combinations of s ...
: ''Ik was aan het werken'' ("I was working")
*
Future progressive: ''Ik zal aan het werken zijn'' ("I will be working")
The second type is formed by one of the conjugated auxiliary verbs ''liggen'' ("to lie"), ''zitten'' ("to sit"), ''hangen'' ("to hang"), ''staan'' ("to stand") or ''lopen'' ("to walk"), followed by the preposition ''te'' and the infinitive. The conjugated verbs indicate the stance of the subject performing or undergoing the action.
*
Present progressive
The present continuous, also called the present progressive or present imperfect, is a verb form used in modern English that combines the present tense with the continuous aspect. It is formed by the present tense form of be and the present part ...
: ''Ik zit te eten'' ("I am eating
hile sitting), ''De was hangt te drogen'' ("The laundry is drying
hile hanging)
*
Past progressive
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:
* Finite verb forms such as ''go'', ''goes'' and ''went''
* Nonfinite forms such as ''(to) go'', ''going'' and ''gone''
* Combinations of s ...
: ''Ik lag te lezen'' ("I was reading
hile lying
Hile ( ne, हिले) is a hill town located in the Eastern Part of Nepal, 13 km north of the regional center of Dhankuta Bazar. At an elevation of 1948 meters, it is the main route to other hilly districts like Bhojpur and Sankhuwasabh ...
), ''Ik stond te kijken'' ("I was watching
hile standing
Hile ( ne, हिले) is a hill town located in the Eastern Development Region, Nepal, Eastern Part of Nepal, 13 km north of the regional center of Dhankuta Bazar. At an elevation of 1948 meters, it is the main route to other hilly distri ...
)
*
Future progressive: ''Ik zal zitten te werken'' ("I will be working
hile sitting)
Sometimes the meaning of the auxiliary verb is diminished to 'being engaged in'. Take for instance these examples:
* ''De leraar zit steeds te zeggen dat we moeten luisteren'' ("The teacher keeps telling us to listen")
* ''Iedereen loopt te beweren dat het goed was'' ("Everyone keeps on saying that it was good")
* ''Zit niet zo te zeuren'' ("Stop whining")
In these cases, there is generally an undertone of irritation.
Slavic languages
The
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
make a clear distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects; it was in relation to these languages that the modern concept of aspect originally developed.
In Slavic languages, a given verb is, in itself, either perfective or imperfective. Consequently, each language contains many pairs of verbs, corresponding to each other in meaning, except that one expresses perfective aspect and the other imperfective. (This may be considered a form of
lexical aspect
In linguistics, the lexical aspect or Aktionsart (, plural ''Aktionsarten'' ) of a verb is part of the way in which that verb is structured in relation to time. For example, the English verbs ''arrive'' and ''run'' differ in their lexical aspect ...
.) Perfective verbs are commonly formed from imperfective ones by the addition of a prefix, or else the imperfective verb is formed from the perfective one by modification of the stem or ending.
Suppletion also plays a small role. Perfective verbs cannot generally be used with the meaning of a present tense – their present-tense forms in fact have future reference. An example of such a pair of verbs, from
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
, is given below:
*Infinitive (and
dictionary form
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' ...
): ''pisać'' ("to write", imperfective); ''napisać'' ("to write", perfective)
*Present/simple future tense: ''pisze'' ("writes"); ''napisze'' ("will write", perfective)
*Compound future tense (imperfective only): ''będzie pisać'' ("will write, will be writing")
*Past tense: ''pisał'' ("was writing, used to write, wrote", imperfective); ''napisał'' ("wrote", perfective)
In at least the East Slavic and West Slavic languages, there is a three-way aspect differentiation for verbs of motion with the determinate imperfective, indeterminate imperfective, and perfective. The two forms of imperfective can be used in all three tenses (past, present, and future), but the perfective can only be used with past and future. The indeterminate imperfective expresses
habitual aspect (or motion in no single direction), while the determinate imperfective expresses
progressive aspect
The continuous and progressive aspects ( abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
In the grammars of many ...
. The difference corresponds closely to that between the English "I (regularly) go to school" and "I am going to school (now)". The three-way difference is given below for the
Russian basic (unprefixed) verbs of motion.
When
prefixes are attached to Russian verbs of motion they become more or less normal imperfective/perfective pairs, with the indeterminate imperfective becoming the prefixed imperfective and the determinate imperfective becoming the prefixed perfective. For example, prefix ''при-'' ''pri-'' + indeterminate ''ходи́ть'' ''khodít'' = ''приходи́ть'' ''prikhodít'' (to arrive (on foot), impf.); and prefix ''при-'' ''pri-'' + determinate ''идти́'' ''idtí'' = ''прийти'' ''prijtí'' (to arrive (on foot), pf.).
Romance languages
Modern Romance languages merge the concepts of aspect and tense but consistently distinguish perfective and imperfective aspects in the past tense. This derives directly from the way the
Latin language
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of t ...
used to render both aspects and ''
consecutio temporum''.
Italian
Italian language example using the verb ''mangiare'' ("to eat"):
The ''imperfetto''/''trapassato prossimo'' contrasts with the ''passato remoto''/''trapassato remoto'' in that ''imperfetto'' renders an imperfective (continuous) past while ''passato remoto'' expresses an aorist (punctual/historical) past.
Other aspects in Italian are rendered with other periphrases, like
prospective (''io sto per mangiare'' "I'm about to eat", ''io starò per mangiare'' "I shall be about to eat"), or
continuous
Continuity or continuous may refer to:
Mathematics
* Continuity (mathematics), the opposing concept to discreteness; common examples include
** Continuous probability distribution or random variable in probability and statistics
** Continuous ...
/
progressive (''io sto mangiando'' "I'm eating", ''io starò mangiando'' "I shall be eating").
Indo-Aryan languages
Hindi
Hindi
Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
has three aspects,
habitual aspect,
perfective aspect and the
progressive aspect
The continuous and progressive aspects ( abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
In the grammars of many ...
. Each of these three aspects are formed from their participles. The aspects of Hindi when conjugated into their personal forms can be put into five grammatical moods:
indicative
A realis mood ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Mos ...
,
presumptive,
subjunctive,
contrafactual, and
imperative. In Hindi, the aspect marker is overtly separated from the tense/mood marker.
Periphrastic
In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one in ...
Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements is the aspect marker. The second element (the copula) is the common tense/mood marker.
There are a couple of verbs which can be used as the copula to the aspectual participles: होना (honā)
o be, happen रहना (rêhnā)
o stay, remain आना (ānā)
o come and जाना (jānā)
o go
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), pl ...
Each of these copulas provide a unique nuance to the aspect. The default (unmarked) copula is होना (honā)
o be
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), pl ...
These copulas can themselves be conjugated into an aspectual participle and used with another copula, hence forming subaspects. (Seeː
Hindi verbs
Hindi verbs are highly inflected in comparison to English, but markedly simple in comparison to Sanskrit, from which Hindi has inherited its verbal conjugation system (through Prakrit). Verbs in Hindi conjugate according to mood, tense, person ...
)
Finnic languages
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
and
Estonian, among others, have a grammatical aspect contrast of
telicity
In linguistics, telicity (; ) is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as having a specific endpoint. A verb or verb phrase with this property is said to be ''telic''; if the situation it describes is ''not'' he ...
between telic and atelic. Telic sentences signal that the intended goal of an action is achieved. Atelic sentences do not signal whether any such goal has been achieved. The aspect is indicated by the
case of the object:
accusative
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...
is telic and
partitive In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either set partitives or entity partitives ba ...
is atelic. For example, the (implicit) purpose of shooting is to kill, such that:
* ''Ammuin karhun'' -- "I shot the bear (succeeded; it is done)" i.e., "I shot the bear dead".
* ''Ammuin karhua'' -- "I shot at the bear" i.e. the bear may have survived.
In rare cases corresponding telic and atelic forms can be unrelated by meaning.
Derivational suffixes exist for various aspects. Examples:
*''-ahta-'' ("once"), as in ''huudahtaa'' ("to yell once") (used for emotive verbs like "laugh", "smile", "growl", "bark"; is not used for verbs like "shoot", "say", "drink")
*''-ele-'' "repeatedly" as in ''ammuskella'' "to go shooting around"
There are derivational suffixes for verbs, which carry
frequentative
In grammar, a frequentative form ( abbreviated or ) of a word is one that indicates repeated action but is not to be confused with iterative aspect. The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a ...
,
momentane In Finnish grammar, the momentane is a verb aspect indicating that an occurrence is sudden and short-lived.
Finnish has a number of momentane markers; they differ in the valency and voice of the verbs they produce, but all indicate sudden, short- ...
,
causative, and
inchoative
Inchoative aspect (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages or European derived languages w ...
aspect meanings. Also, pairs of verbs differing only in
transitivity exist.
Austronesian languages
Reo Rapa
The
Rapa language
Rapa (or ''Rapan'') is the language of Rapa Iti, in the Austral Islands of French Polynesia, and of Mangaia in the Cook Islands. It is an Eastern Polynesian language. There are three varieties of the Rapa language currently being spoken in Fre ...
(Reo Rapa) is a mixed language that grew out of
Tahitian and Old Rapa among monolingual inhabitants of
Rapa Iti
Rapa, also called Rapa Iti, or "Little Rapa", to distinguish it from Easter Island, whose Polynesian name is Rapa Nui, is the largest and only inhabited island of the Bass Islands in French Polynesia. An older name for the island is Oparo. The ...
. Old Rapa words are still used for grammar and sentence structure, but most common words were replaced by
Tahitian words. Rapa is similar to
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
as they both have specific tense words such as ''did'' or ''do''.
*Past negative: ''ki’ere'' /kiʔere/
*Non-past negative (Regular negative) ''kāre'' /kaːre/
Hawaiian
The
Hawaiian language conveys aspect as follows:
*The unmarked verb, frequently used, can indicate habitual aspect or perfective aspect in the past.
*''ke'' + verb + ''nei'' is frequently used and conveys the progressive aspect in the present.
*''e'' + verb + ''ana'' conveys the progressive aspect in any tense.
*''ua'' + verb conveys the perfective aspect but is frequently omitted.
Wuvulu
Wuvulu language is a minority language in Pacific. The Wuvulu verbal aspect is hard to organize because of its number of morpheme combinations and the interaction of semantics between morphemes.
Perfective, imperfective negation, simultaneous and habitual are four aspects markers in Wuvulu language.
* Perfective: The perfective marker ''-li'' indicates the action is done before other action.
* Imperfect negation: The marker ''ta-'' indicates the action has not done and also doesn't show anything about the action will be done in the future.
* Simultaneous: The marker ''fi'' indicates the two actions are done at the same time or one action occurs while other action is in progress.
* Habitual: The marker fane- can indicate a habitual activity, which means "keep doing something" in English. Example:
Tokelauan
There are three types of aspects one must consider when analyzing the Tokelauan language: inherent aspect, situation aspect, and viewpoint aspect.
The inherent aspect describes the purpose of a verb and what separates verbs from one another. According to Vendler, inherent aspect can be categorized into four different types: activities, achievements, accomplishments, and states. Simple activities include verbs such as pull, jump, and punch. Some achievements are continue and win. Drive-a-car is an accomplishment while hate is an example of a state. Another way to recognize a state inherent aspect is to note whether or not it changes. For example, if someone were to hate vegetables because they are allergic, this state of hate is unchanging and thus, a state inherent aspect. On the other hand, an achievement, unlike a state, only lasts for a short amount of time. Achievement is the highpoint of an action.
Another type of aspect is situation aspect. Situation aspect is described to be what one is experiencing in his or her life through that circumstance. Therefore, it is his or her understanding of the situation. Situation aspect are abstract terms that are not physically tangible. They are also used based upon one's point of view. For example, a professor may say that a student who comes a minute before each class starts is a punctual student. Based upon the professor's judgment of what punctuality is, he or she may make that assumption of the situation with the student. Situation aspect is firstly divided into states and occurrences, then later subdivided under occurrences into processes and events, and lastly, under events, there are accomplishments and achievements.
The third type of aspect is viewpoint aspect. Viewpoint aspect can be likened to situation aspect such that they both take into consideration one's inferences. However, viewpoint aspect diverges from situation aspect because it is where one decides to view or see such event. A perfect example is the glass metaphor: Is the glass half full or is it half empty. The choice of being half full represents an optimistic viewpoint while the choice of being half empty represents a pessimistic viewpoint. Not only does viewpoint aspect separate into negative and positive, but rather different point of views. Having two people describe a painting can bring about two different viewpoints. One may describe a situation aspect as a perfect or imperfect. A perfect situation aspect entails an event with no reference to time, while an imperfect situation aspect makes a reference to time with the observation.
Torau
Aspect in Torau is marked with post-verbal particles or clitics. While the system for marking the imperfective aspect is complex and highly developed, it is unclear if Torau marks the perfective and neutral viewpoints. The imperfective clitics index one of the core arguments, usually the nominative subject, and follow the rightmost element in a syntactic structure larger than the word. The two distinct forms for marking the imperfective aspect are ''(i)sa-'' and ''e-''. While more work needs to be done on this language, the preliminary hypothesis is that ''(i)sa-'' encodes the stative imperfective and ''e-'' encodes the active imperfective. It is also important to note that reduplication always cooccurs with ''e-'', but it usually does not with ''(i)sa-.'' This example below shows these two imperfective aspect markers giving different meanings to similar sentences.
In Torau, the suffix -''to'', which must attach to a preverbal particle, may indicate similar meaning to the perfective aspect. In realis clauses, this suffix conveys an event that is entirely in the past and no longer occurring. When ''-to'' is used in irrealis clauses, the speaker conveys that the event will definitely occur (Palmer, 2007). Although this suffix is not explicitly stated as a perfective viewpoint marker, the meaning that it contributes is very similar to the perfective viewpoint.
Malay/Indonesian
Like many
Austronesian languages, the verbs of the
Malay language
Malay (; ms, Bahasa Melayu, links=no, Jawi alphabet, Jawi: , Rejang script, Rencong: ) is an Austronesian languages, Austronesian language that is an official language of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and that is also spo ...
follow a system of affixes to express changes in meaning. To express the aspects, Malay uses a number of
auxiliary verbs:
:*''sudah'':
perfective
The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the i ...
, 'saya sudah makan' = 'I have
lreadyeaten'
:*''baru'': near perfective, 'saya baru makan' = 'I have just eaten'
:*''belum'':
imperfective
The imperfective (abbreviated or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a g ...
, 'saya belum makan' = 'I have not eaten'
:*''sedang'':
progressive not implicating an end
:*''masih'': progressive implicating an end
:*''pernah'':
semelfactive
In linguistics, semelfactive is a class of aktionsart or lexical aspect (verb aspects that reflect the temporal flow of the denoted event, lexically incorporated into the verb's root itself rather than grammatically expressed by inflections or aux ...
Philippine languages
Like many
Austronesian languages, the verbs of the
Philippine languages
The Philippine languages or Philippinic are a proposed group by R. David Paul Zorc (1986) and Robert Blust (1991; 2005; 2019) that include all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Indonesia—except Sama–Bajaw (languag ...
follow a complex system of affixes to express subtle changes in meaning. However, the verbs in this family of languages are conjugated to express the aspects and not the tenses. Though many of the
Philippine languages
The Philippine languages or Philippinic are a proposed group by R. David Paul Zorc (1986) and Robert Blust (1991; 2005; 2019) that include all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Indonesia—except Sama–Bajaw (languag ...
do not have a fully codified grammar, most of them follow the verb aspects that are demonstrated by
Filipino
Filipino may refer to:
* Something from or related to the Philippines
** Filipino language, standardized variety of 'Tagalog', the national language and one of the official languages of the Philippines.
** Filipinos, people who are citizens of th ...
or
Tagalog.
Creole languages
Creole language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
s typically use the unmarked verb for timeless habitual aspect, or for stative aspect, or for perfective aspect in the past. Invariant pre-verbal markers are often used. Non-stative verbs typically can optionally be marked for the progressive, habitual, completive, or irrealis aspect. The progressive in English-based
Atlantic Creoles often uses ''de'' (from English "be").
Jamaican Creole
Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West African influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English wo ...
uses ''a'' (from English "are") or ''de'' for the present progressive and a combination of the past time marker (''did'' , ''behn'' , ''ehn'' or ''wehn'') and the progressive marker (''a'' or ''de'') for the past progressive (e.g. ''did a'' or ''wehn de'').
Haitian Creole uses the progressive marker ''ap''. Some Atlantic Creoles use one marker for both the habitual and progressive aspects. In
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...
, the optional progressive marker follows the verb. Completive markers tend to come from superstrate words like "done" or "finish", and some creoles model the future/irrealis marker on the superstrate word for "go".
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is similar to many other sign languages in that it has no grammatical tense but many verbal aspects produced by modifying the base verb sign.
An example is illustrated with the verb
TELL. The basic form of this sign is produced with the initial posture of the index finger on the chin, followed by a movement of the hand and finger tip toward the indirect object (the recipient of the telling). Inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect ("to be just about to tell"), the sign begins with the hand moving from in front of the trunk in an arc to the initial posture of the base sign (i.e., index finger touching the chin) while inhaling through the mouth, dropping the jaw, and directing eye gaze toward the verb's object. The posture is then held rather than moved toward the indirect object. During the hold, the signer also stops the breath by closing the glottis. Other verbs (such as "look at", "wash the dishes", "yell", "flirt") are inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect similarly: The hands used in the base sign move in an arc from in front of the trunk to the initial posture of the underlying verb sign while inhaling, dropping the jaw, and directing eye gaze toward the verb's object (if any), but subsequent movements and postures are dropped as the posture and breath are held.
Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative ("to begin to..."), predispositional ("to tend to..."), susceptative ("to... easily"), frequentative ("to... often"), protractive ("to... continuously"), incessant ("to... incessantly"), durative ("to... for a long time"), iterative ("to... over and over again"), intensive ("to... very much"), resultative ("to... completely"), approximative ("to... somewhat"), semblitive ("to appear to..."), increasing ("to... more and more"). Some aspects combine with others to create yet finer distinctions.
Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derived for aspect lose their grammatical transitivity. They remain semantically transitive, typically assuming an object made prominent using a topic marker or mentioned in a previous sentence. See
Syntax in ASL for details.
Terms for various aspects
The following aspectual terms are found in the literature. Approximate English equivalents are given.
*
Perfective
The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the i ...
: 'I struck the bell' (an event viewed in its entirety, without reference to its temporal structure during its occurrence)
*
Momentane In Finnish grammar, the momentane is a verb aspect indicating that an occurrence is sudden and short-lived.
Finnish has a number of momentane markers; they differ in the valency and voice of the verbs they produce, but all indicate sudden, short- ...
: 'The mouse squeaked once' (contrasted to 'The mouse squeaked / was squeaking')
*
Perfect (a common conflation of aspect and tense): 'I have arrived' (brings attention to the consequences of a situation in the past)
**
Recent perfect, also known as ''after perfect'': 'I just ate' or 'I am after eating' (
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English (from Latin '' Hibernia'': "Ireland"), and in ga, Béarla na hÉireann. or Irish English, also formerly Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland ...
)
*
Discontinuous past Discontinuous past is a category of past tense of verbs argued to exist in some languages which have a meaning roughly characterizable as "past and not present" or "past with no present relevance". The phrase "discontinuous past" was first used in E ...
: In English a sentence such as "I put it on the table" is neutral in implication (the object could still be on the table or not), but in some languages such as
Chichewa the equivalent tense carries an implication that the object is no longer there. It is thus the opposite of the perfect aspect.
*
Prospective (a conflation of aspect and tense): 'He is about to fall', 'I am going to cry" (brings attention to the anticipation of a future situation)
*
Imperfective
The imperfective (abbreviated or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a g ...
(an activity with ongoing nature: combines the meanings of both the continuous and the habitual aspects): 'I was walking to work' (continuous) or 'I walked (used to walk, would walk) to work every day' (habitual).
**
Habitual: 'I used to walk home from work', 'I would walk home from work every day', 'I walk home from work every day' (a subtype of imperfective)
**
Continuous
Continuity or continuous may refer to:
Mathematics
* Continuity (mathematics), the opposing concept to discreteness; common examples include
** Continuous probability distribution or random variable in probability and statistics
** Continuous ...
: 'I am eating' or 'I know' (situation is described as ongoing and either evolving or unevolving; a subtype of imperfective)
***
Progressive: 'I am eating' (action is described as ongoing and evolving; a subtype of continuous)
***
Stative
According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are ...
: 'I know French' (situation is described as ongoing but not evolving; a subtype of continuous)
*
Gnomic/generic: 'Fish swim and birds fly' (general truths)
*
Episodic: 'The bird flew' (non-gnomic)
*
Continuative aspect
The continuative aspect (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect representing actions that are 'still' happening. English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
P ...
: 'I am still eating'
*
Inceptive/ingressive: 'I started to run' (beginning of a new action: dynamic)
*
Inchoative
Inchoative aspect (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages or European derived languages w ...
: 'The flowers started to bloom' (beginning of a new state: static)
*
Terminative/cessative: 'I finished eating/reading'
*
Defective: 'I almost fell'
*
Pausative: 'I stopped working for a while'
*
Resumptive: 'I resumed sleeping'
*
Punctual: 'I slept'
*
Durative/Delimitative: 'I slept for a while'
*
Protractive: 'The argument went on and on'
*
Iterative
Iteration is the repetition of a process in order to generate a (possibly unbounded) sequence of outcomes. Each repetition of the process is a single iteration, and the outcome of each iteration is then the starting point of the next iteration. ...
: 'I read the same books again and again'
*
Frequentative
In grammar, a frequentative form ( abbreviated or ) of a word is one that indicates repeated action but is not to be confused with iterative aspect. The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a ...
: 'It sparkled', contrasted with 'It sparked'. Or, 'I run around', vs. 'I run'
* Experiential: 'I have gone to school many times' (see for example
Chinese aspects)
*
Intentional
Intentions are mental states in which the agent commits themselves to a course of action. Having the plan to visit the zoo tomorrow is an example of an intention. The action plan is the ''content'' of the intention while the commitment is the ''a ...
: 'I listened carefully'
*
Accidental: 'I accidentally knocked over the chair'
*
Intensive
In grammar, an intensive word form is one which denotes stronger, more forceful, or more concentrated action relative to the root on which the intensive is built. Intensives are usually lexical formations, but there may be a regular process for for ...
: 'It glared'
*
Moderative: 'It shone'
*
Attenuative: 'It glimmered'
*
Segmentative: 'It is coming out in successive multitudes'
See also
*
Aktionsart
In linguistics, the lexical aspect or Aktionsart (, plural ''Aktionsarten'' ) of a verb is part of the way in which that verb is structured in relation to time. For example, the English verbs ''arrive'' and ''run'' differ in their lexical aspec ...
*
Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moods and tenses
*
Aspect in Standard Chinese
*
Grammatical conjugation
*
Grammatical tense
*
Grammatical mood
*
Nominal TAM (tense–aspect–mood)
*
Tense–aspect–mood
Tense–aspect–mood (commonly abbreviated ) or tense–modality–aspect (abbreviated as ) is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different la ...
Notes
Other references
*''Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics'' (), by Hadumod Bussmann, edited by Gregory P. Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi, Routledge, London 1996. Translation of German ''Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft'' Kröner Verlag,
Stuttgart 1990.
Morfofonologian harjoituksia, Lauri Carlson
*
*Berdinetto, P. M., & Delfitto, D. (2000). "Aspect vs. Actionality: Some reasons for keeping them apart". In O. Dahl (Ed.), ''Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe'' (pp. 189–226). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
*Binnick, R. I. (1991). ''Time and the verb: A guide to tense and aspect''. New York: Oxford University Press.
*Binnick, R. I. (2006). "Aspect and Aspectuality". In B. Aarts & A. M. S. McMahon (Eds.), ''The Handbook of English Linguistics'' (pp. 244–268). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
*
*Comrie, B. (1976). ''Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems''. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
*Frawley, W. (1992). ''Linguistic semantics''. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
*Kabakciev, K. (2000)
''Aspect in English: a "common-sense" view of the interplay between verbal and nominal referents''(Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy). Springer. Retrieved 2016-05-18.
*
*MacDonald, J. E. (2008). ''The syntactic nature of inner aspect: A minimalist perspective''. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
*Maslov, I. S. (1998). "Vid glagol'nyj"
Aspect of the verb" In V. N. Yartseva (Ed.), ''Jazykoznanie: Bol'shoj entsyklopedicheskij slovar'' (pp. 83–84). Moscow: Bol'shaja Rossijskaja Entsyklopedija.
*Richardson, K. (2007). ''Case and aspect in Slavic''. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
*
*Sasse, H.-J. (2006). "Aspect and Aktionsart". In E. K. Brown (Ed.), ''Encyclopedia of language and linguistics'' (Vol. 1, pp. 535–538). Boston: Elsevier.
*
Smith, Carlota S. (1991). ''The parameter of aspect''. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
*
*Travis, Lisa deMena (2010). "Inner aspect", Dordrecht, Springer..
*Verkuyl, H. (1972). ''On the Compositional Nature of the Aspects'', Reidel, Dordrecht.
*Verkuyl, H. (1993). ''A Theory of Aspectuality: the interaction between temporal and atemporal structure''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Verkuyl, H. (2005). "How (in-)sensitive is tense to aspectual information?" In B. Hollebrandse, A. van Hout & C. Vet (Eds.), ''Crosslinguistic views on tense, aspect and modality'' (pp. 145–169). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
*Zalizniak, A. A., & Shmelev, A. D. (2000). ''Vvedenie v russkuiu aspektologiiu''
'Introduction to Russian aspectology'' Moskva: IAzyki russkoi kul’tury.
External links
Robert Binnick, Annotated tense/aspect bibliography(around 9000 entries)
TAMPA: Aspect Explained* Anna Kibort
Aspekt
a pdf version of the book
- a column overview of the English tenses
{{DEFAULTSORT:Grammatical Aspect