Grammatical aspect

Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event or state, denoted by a verb, relates to the flow of time.

A basic aspectual distinction is that between perfective and imperfective aspects (not to be confused with perfect and imperfect verb forms; the meanings of the latter terms are somewhat different). 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 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 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 (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). 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 imperfects and preterites. Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages; here verbs often occur in the language in pairs, with two related verbs being used respectively for imperfective and perfective meanings.

Basic concept

History

The Indian linguist Yaska (ca. 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 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, as they describe the present situation, yet each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present. As such, they differ in aspect.

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 (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"). 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 of the French verb "savoir" and the Spanish equivalent "saber."

Aspect versus tense

The Germanic languages 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 [in the past tense] habitual) 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 yet?" and "Did you eat yet?". Another is in the pluperfect ("I had eaten"), which sometimes represents the combination of past tense and perfect ("I was full because I had already eaten"), but sometimes simply represents a past action that is anterior to another past action ("A little while after I had eaten, my friend arrived"). (The latter situation is often represented in other languages by a simple perfective tense. Formal Spanish and French use a past anterior tense in cases such as this.)

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 (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. ὁράω - I see (present); εἶδον - I saw (aorist); οἶδα - I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect).

Many Sino-Tibetan languages, like Mandarin, lack grammatical tense but are rich in aspect.

Lexical vs. grammatical aspect

Main article: Lexical aspect

There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect. Lexical aspect 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, 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, 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 (except Slavic 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 (e.g., English).

In literary Arabic (الفصحى, al-Fuṣḥa) 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" (فعل ماضي, fi'l maadiy) denotes an event (حدث, hadath) completed in the past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, "وصل", wasala, "he arrived", indicates that arrival occurred in the past without saying anything about the present status of the arriver - maybe he stuck around, maybe he 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" (فعل المضارع, fi'l al-mudaara'ah), 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: يضرب (yadribu, he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.). Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting "أمر"، "amr", command, which the tradition counts as denoting future events.) 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-Fusha is the use of a prefix particle (ب "bi" in most dialects) 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 (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, ηκουομεν (ēkouomen, "we listened") vs. ηκουσαμεν (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.

Aspect by language

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 (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 (not progressive, not perfect): "I eat"
• Present progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
• Present perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
• Present perfect progressive (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 he "has eaten" or "has been eating". The present auxiliary implies that he is in some way present (alive), even if the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).)

Aspects of the past tense:

• Past simple (not progressive, not perfect): "I ate"
• Past progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
• Past perfect (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 with progressive aspect), "(to) have eaten" (infinitive with perfect aspect), "having eaten" (present participle or gerund with perfect aspect), 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:

• Simple future, simple conditional: "I will eat", "I would eat"
• Future progressive, conditional progressive: "I will be eating", "I would be eating"
• Future perfect, conditional perfect: "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. (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)

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."

Note that the aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as African-American Vernacular English (see for example habitual be), and of creoles based on English vocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English, are quite different from those of standard English, and often distinguish aspect at the expense of tense.

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 ("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).

Slavic languages

Main article: Grammatical aspect in 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. (This may be considered a form of 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, is given below:

• Infinitive (and dictionary form): 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 two forms of imperfective, determinate and indeterminate, and one form of 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 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, although the prefixes are generally attached to the indeterminate imperfective to form the prefixed imperfective and to the determinate imperfective to form the prefixed perfective. For example, prefix при- + indeterminate ходи́ть = приходи́ть; and prefix при- + determinate идти́ = прийти (to arrive (on foot)).

Russian Verbs of Motion
Imperfective		Perfective	Translation
Indeterminate	Determinate
ходи́ть	идти́	пойти	to go by foot (walk)
е́здить	е́хать	поехать	to go by transport (drive, train, bus, etc.)
бе́гать	бежа́ть	побежать	to run
броди́ть	брести́	побрести	to stroll, to wander
гоня́ть	гнать	погнать	to chase, to drive (cattle, etc.)
ла́зить	лезть	полезть	to climb
лета́ть	лете́ть	полететь	to fly
пла́вать	плыть	поплыть	to swim, to sail
по́лзать	ползти́	поползти	to crawl
вози́ть	везти́	повезти	to carry (by vehicle)
носи́ть	нести́	понести	to carry, to wear
води́ть	вести́	повести	to lead, to accompany, to drive (a car)
таска́ть	тащи́ть	потащить	to drag, to pull
ката́ть	кати́ть	покатить	to roll

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 ("to eat"):

Mood: indicativo (indicative)

• Presente (present): io mangio ("I eat", "I'm eating") - merges habitual and continuous aspects, among others
• Passato prossimo (recent past): io ho mangiato ("I ate", "I have eaten") - merges perfective and perfect

• Imperfetto (imperfect): io mangiavo ("I was eating", or "I usually ate") - merges habitual and progressive aspects
• Trapassato prossimo (recent pluperfect): io avevo mangiato ("I had eaten") - tense, not ordinarily marked for aspect

• Passato remoto (far past): io mangiai ("I ate") - perfective aspect
• Trapassato remoto (far pluperfect): io ebbi mangiato ("I had eaten") - tense

• Futuro semplice (simple future): io mangerò ("I shall eat") - tense
• Futuro anteriore (future perfect): io avrò mangiato ("I shall have eaten") - future tense and perfect tense/aspect

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/progressive (io sto mangiando "I'm eating", io starò mangiando "I shall be eating").

Finnic languages

Finnish 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 (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, momentane, causative, and inchoative aspect meanings. Also, pairs of verbs differing only in transitivity exist.

Austronesian languages

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.

Indonesian

Main article: Indonesian grammar

Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of the Indonesian language follow a system of affixes to express changes in meaning. To express the aspects, Indonesian uses a number of auxiliary verbs:

• Sudah: perfective
• Baru: near perfective
• Belum: imperfective
• Sedang: progressive not implicating an end
• Masih: progressive implicating an end
• Pernah: semelfactive

Philippine languages

Main article: Tagalog grammar § Verbs

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

Creole languages 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 uses pan (from English "upon") for the present progressive and wa (from English "was") 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

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..."), predisposional ("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: 'I struck the bell' (an event viewed in its entirety, without reference to its temporal structure during its occurrence)
• Momentane: '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)
• Prospective (a conflation of aspect and tense): 'He is about to fall', 'I am going to cry" (brings attention to the anticipation of an imminent future situation)
• Imperfective (an activity with ongoing nature: combines the meanings of both the progressive and the habitual aspects): 'I was walking to work' (progressive) or 'I walked (used to walk, would walk) to work every day' (habitual).
• 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: 'I know French' (situation is described as ongoing but not evolving; a subtype of continuous)
• 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)
• Gnomic/generic: 'Fish swim and birds fly' (general truths)
• Episodic: 'The bird flew' (non-gnomic)
• Continuative aspect: 'I am still eating'
• Inceptive or ingressive: 'I started to run' (beginning of a new action: dynamic)
• Inchoative: '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: 'I slept for a while'
• Delimitative: 'I slept for an hour'
• Protractive: 'The argument went on and on'
• Iterative: 'I read the same books again and again'
• Frequentative: '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: 'I listened carefully'
• Accidental: 'I accidentally knocked over the chair'
• Intensive: 'It glared'
• Moderative: 'It shone'
• Attenuative: 'It glimmered'
• Segmentative: 'It is coming out in successive multitudes'

See also

• Aktionsart
• Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moods and tenses
• Grammatical conjugation
• Grammatical tense
• Grammatical mood
• Nominal TAM (tense–aspect–mood)
• Tense–aspect–mood

Other references

• Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (ISBN 0-415-20319-8), 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

• Bache, C. (1982). Aspect and Aktionsart: Towards a semantic distinction. Journal of Linguistics, 18(01), 57-72.
• 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.
• Chertkova, M. Y. (2004). Vid or Aspect? On the Typology of a Slavic and Romance Category [Using Russian and Spanish Material]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Filologiya, 58(9-1), 97-122.
• 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.
• Kortmann, B. (1991). The Triad "Tense–Aspect–Aktionsart". Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 6, 9-30.
• 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. (2002). Recent activity in the theory of aspect: Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state? Linguistic Typology, 6(2), 199-271.
• 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, C. S. (1991). The parameter of aspect. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Tatevosov, S. (2002). The parameter of actionality. Linguistic Typology, 6(3), 317-401.
• Travis, L. (in preparation). Inner aspect.
• 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

• http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/features/morphosemantic/aspect/ doi 10.15126/SMG.18/1.08

• TAMPA: Aspect Explained
• Robert Binnick annotated tense/aspect bibliography (around 9000 entries)
• Anna Katarzyna Młynarczyk: Aspectual Pairing in Polish, a pdf version of the book
• Grammar Tutorials - a column overview of the English tenses
• Greek tenses
• Verb Aspect