Grammatical aspect


Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, 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. Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows.
Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions from repetitive actions.
Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation in time between the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten".
Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; some do not make any. The marking of aspect is often conflated with the marking of tense and mood. Aspectual distinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance languages, for example, the perfective–imperfective distinction is marked in the past tense, by the division between preterites and imperfects. Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages; 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 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 dealt with grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that are processes, from those where the action is considered as a completed whole. 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 earliest use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary 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, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence. 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, distinguished through overt inflection, derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required markers of those aspects. For example, the K'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le 了, -zhe 着, zài- 在, and -guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle. Even languages that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other syntactic constructions.
Grammatical aspect is distinguished from 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, the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin.
LanguagePerfective AspectImperfective Aspect
LatinPerfectImperfect
SpanishPreteriteImperfect
FrenchPassé simpleImperfect
GreekAoristImperfect

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.
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" and "I was writing letters this morning".
In describing longer time periods, English needs context to maintain the distinction between the habitual and perfective, 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" and "to find out" 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". 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 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 combine the concept of aspect with the concept of tense. Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects 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?".
Like tense, aspect is a way that verbs represent time. However, rather than locating an event or state in 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". 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 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. ὁράω – I see ; εἶδον – I saw ; οἶδα – I am in a state of having seen = I know.
Many Sino-Tibetan languages, like Mandarin, lack grammatical tense but are rich in aspect.

Lexical vs. grammatical aspect

There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect. Other terms for the pair 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, activities, accomplishments, achievements, and punctual, or semelfactive, events. 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, especially by German and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in Athabaskan languages.
One of the factors in situation aspect is telicity. 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 semelfactives 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, aspect has become almost entirely conflated, in the verbal morphological system, with time.
In Russian, 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.
In Hindi, the aspect marker is ouvertly separated from the tense/mood marker. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element is the common tense/mood marker.
In literary Arabic the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective, and imperfective. There is some disagreement among grammarians whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both. The past verb denotes an event completed in the past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, وَصَلَ 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", 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: يَضْرِبُ‎. Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic At least that's the way the tradition sees it. 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 to explicitly mark progressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: بيكتب, bi-yiktib, he is now writing, writes all the time, etc.
Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospective aspect 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 and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state or the start of an action. Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative.
Important qualifications:

Germanic languages

English

The English tense–aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, present and past. No marker of a future tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity of an event may be expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall", by a present form plus an adverb, as in "tomorrow we go to New York City", or by some other means. Past is distinguished from present–future, in contrast, with internal modifications of the verb. These two tenses may be modified further for progressive 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:
, even if the action denoted is completed or partially completed
Aspects of the past tense:
Aspects can also be marked on non-finite forms of the verb: " be eating", " have eaten", "having eaten", etc. The perfect infinitive can further be governed by modal verbs 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:
The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:
But they can have other illocutionary forces or additional modal components:
For further discussion of the uses of the various tense–aspect combinations, see Uses of English verb forms.
English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. Used to + VERB is a past habitual, as in "I used to go to school," and going to / 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, and of creoles based on English vocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English, are quite different from those of standard English, and often reflect a more elaborate paradigm of aspectual distinctions. The following table, appearing originally in Green shows the possible aspectual distinctions in AAVE in their prototypical, negative and stressed/emphatic affirmative forms:
Aspect/TensePrototypicalStressed / Emphatic AffirmativeNegative
Habitual'be eating'
'DO be eating''don be eating'
Remote Past'BIN eating'
'HAVE BIN eating''ain/haven't BIN eating'
Remote Past Completive'BIN ate''HAD BIN ate''ain/haven't BIN ate'
Remote Past Perfect'had BIN ate''HAD BIN ate''hadn't BIN ate'
Resultant State'dən ate''HAVE dən ate''ain dən ate'
Past Perfect Resultant State'had dən ate''HAD dən ate''hadn’t dən ate'
Modal Resultant State'should'a dən ate'----
Remote Past Resultant State'BIN dən ate''HAVE BIN dən ate''ain/haven’t BIN dən ate'
Remote Past Perfect Resultant State'had BIN dən ate'----
Future Resultant State/Conditional' ’a be dən ate''WILL be dən ate''won’t be dən ate'
Modal Resultant State'might/may be dən ate''MIGHT/MAY be dən ate''might/may not be dən ate'

German vernacular and colloquial

Although Standard German does not have aspects, many Upper German languages, all West Central German 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 regiolects. 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 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" ; 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" vs. "I hu's daleant".

Dutch

In Dutch, 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, followed by aan het and the gerund. For example:
The second type is formed by one of the conjugated auxiliary verbs liggen, zitten, hangen, staan or lopen, followed by the preposition te and the infinitive. The conjugated verbs indicate the stance of the subject performing or undergoing the action.
Sometimes the meaning of the auxiliary verb is diminished to 'being engaged in'. Take for instance these examples:
In these cases, there is generally an undertone of irritation.

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages 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. 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, is given below:
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, but the perfective can only be used with past and future. The indeterminate imperfective expresses habitual aspect, while the determinate imperfective expresses progressive aspect. The difference corresponds closely to that between the English "I go to school" and "I am going to school ". The three-way difference is given [|below] for the Russian basic 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' ; and prefix при- pri- + determinate идти́ idtí = прийти prijtí.

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 used to render both aspects and consecutio temporum.
Italian language example using the verb mangiare :
Mood: indicativo
The imperfetto/trapassato prossimo contrasts with the passato remoto/trapassato remoto in that imperfetto renders an imperfective past while passato remoto expresses an aorist past.
Other aspects in Italian are rendered with other periphrases, like prospective, or continuous/progressive.

Indo-Aryan languages

Hindi

In Hindi, the aspect marker is ouvertly separated from the tense/mood marker. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements is the aspect marker. The second element is the common tense/mood marker. Hindi has three aspects, habitual aspect, perfective aspect and the progressive aspect. 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 gramamtical moods: indicative, presumptive, subjunctive, contrafactual, and imperative. The aspect-marking participles are shown in bold in the following table. IPA letters are used to transliterate from Devanagari into Latin script.
There are four verbs which can be used as the copula in Hindi: होना , रहना , आना , and जाना . Out of these, होना is the default and the other add additional nuance to the aspect, hence forming sub-aspects for each primary aspect.
The aspects formed using the verbs other than होना need to be put into their participle forms such that the verb होना acts as the copula which can be conjugated be put into the different grammatical moods. e.g. रहना is converted into its habitual participle रहता and then the default copula होना is added to form the habitual infinitive रहता होना, similarly जाना is converted into its preterite participle गया and the copula होना is added to form the perfective infintive गया होना. The compound aspect-marking participles hence formed are shown in bold in the table below. The primary participle decides which aspect the compound aspect-marking partciple conveys in whole and the secondary participle adds nuance to the compound participle.
Note:
and Estonian, among others, have a grammatical aspect contrast of telicity 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 is telic and partitive is atelic. For example, the purpose of shooting is to kill, such that:
In rare cases corresponding telic and atelic forms can be unrelated by meaning.
Derivational suffixes exist for various aspects. Examples:
There are derivational suffixes for verbs, which carry frequentative, momentane, causative, and inchoative aspect meanings. Also, pairs of verbs differing only in transitivity exist.

Austronesian languages

Reo Rapa

The Rapa language was not created by the combination of two languages, but through the introduction of Tahitian to the monolingual Rapa community. 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 as they both have specific tense words such as did or do.
The Hawaiian language conveys aspect as follows:
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.
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 sa- and e-. While more work needs to be done on this language, the preliminary hypothesis is that 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 sa-. This example below shows these two imperfective aspect markers giving different meanings to similar sentences.
Pita ma-to mate=sa-la.
Peter RL.3SGS-PST be.dead=IPFV-3SGS
‘Peter was dead.’
Pita ma-to maa≈mate=e-la.
Peter RF.3SG-PST RD≈be.dead=IPFV-3SGS
‘Peter was dying.’
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. Although this suffix isn’t 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 follow a system of affixes to express changes in meaning. To express the aspects, Malay uses a number of auxiliary verbs:

Philippine languages

Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of the Philippine languages 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 do not have a fully codified grammar, most of them follow the verb aspects that are demonstrated by Filipino or Tagalog.

Creole languages

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. Jamaican Creole uses a or de for the present progressive and a combination of the past time marker and the progressive marker for the past progressive. Haitian Creole uses the progressive marker ap. Some Atlantic Creoles use one marker for both the habitual and progressive aspects. In Tok Pisin, 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

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. 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. Inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect, the sign begins with the hand moving from in front of the trunk in an arc to the initial posture of the base sign 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 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, but subsequent movements and postures are dropped as the posture and breath are held.
Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative, predispositional, susceptative, frequentative, protractive, incessant, durative, iterative, intensive, resultative, approximative, semblitive, increasing. 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.