Inchoative aspect (
abbreviated or ) is a
grammatical aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...
, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative
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, D ...
such as
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, 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 ...
and
Lithuanian, and also in
Finnic languages
The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7  ...
or European derived languages with high percentage of Latin-based words like
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communic ...
. It should not be confused with the
prospective,
which denotes actions that are about to start. The English language can approximate the inchoative aspect through the verbs "to become" or "to get" combined with an adjective.
Since inchoative is a grammatical aspect and not a
tense, it can be combined with tenses to form past inchoative, frequentative past inchoative and future inchoative, all used in
Lithuanian. In
Russian, inchoatives are regularly derived from unidirectional imperfective verbs of motion by adding the prefix по- ''po-'', e.g. ''bezhát''', ''pobezhát''': "to run", "to start running". Also compare ''shli'' (normal past tense plural of ''idtí'', "to go") with ''Poshlí!'' meaning approximately "Let's get going!". Certain other verbs can be marked for the inchoative aspect with the prefix за- ''za-'' (e.g. ''on zasmejálsja'', "he started laughing", ''on zaplákal'' "he started crying"). Similar behavior is observed in
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
, and in other
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 ...
. In Latin, the inchoative aspect was marked with the infix ''-sc-'' (', I love; ', I'm starting to love, I'm falling in love; ', to flower, ', to start flowering, etc.). In
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communic ...
, any verb is made inchoative by the prefix ''ek-'', e.g. ', ': "to dance", "to start dancing".
The term
inchoative verb is used by
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...
ians to refer to a class of verbs that reflect a change of state; e. g., "John aged" or "The fog cleared". This usage bears little or no relationship to the aspectual usage described above.
References
{{Grammatical aspects
Grammatical aspects
Latin grammar
Russian grammar
Ukrainian grammar