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. 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. Yet since they differ in aspect each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present. All are in the present tense, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence ( eat, am, and have). 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.įor example, consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". Thus tense refers to temporally when while aspect refers to temporally how. 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. Modern usage Īspect is often confused with the closely related concept of tense, because they both convey information about time. The earliest use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1853. 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. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal. This is the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. 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). 6.1.2 African American Vernacular English. 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. 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. 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. The marking of aspect is often conflated with the marking of tense and mood (see tense–aspect–mood). ĭifferent languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions some (such as Standard German see below) do not make any. 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". Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows ("I was helping him" "I used to help people").įurther distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect).Ĭertain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. 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"). In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time.
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