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unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2013) Grammatical categories Agency Animacy Associated motion Aspect Case Clusivity Comparison Definiteness Evidentiality Focus Gender Mirativity Modality Mood Noun class Number Person Polarity Tense Topic Transitivity Valency Voice Volition v t e Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event or state, d enoted by a verb, relates to the flow of time. A basic aspectual distinction is that between perfective and imperfective aspect s (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 tim e during it ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceiv ed 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 dist inguish states and ongoing actions (continuous and progressive aspects) from rep etitive 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 r eference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; some (suc h 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 dis tinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance language s, for example, the perfective imperfective distinction is marked in the past tens e, by the division between imperfects and preterites. Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages; here verb s often occur in the language in pairs, with two related verbs being used respec

tively for imperfective and perfective meanings. Contents [hide] 1 Basic concept 1.1 History 1.2 Modern usage 2 Common aspectual distinctions 3 Aspect vs. tense 4 Lexical vs. grammatical aspect 5 Indicating aspect 6 Aspect by language 6.1 English 6.2 German vernacular and colloquial 6.3 Slavic languages 6.4 Romance languages 6.5 Finnic languages 6.6 Philippine languages 6.7 Hawaiian 6.8 Creole languages 6.9 American Sign Language 7 Terms for various aspects 8 See also 9 Notes 10 Other references 11 External links Basic concept[edit] History[edit] The Indian linguist Yaska (ca. 7th century BCE) dealt with grammatical aspect, d istinguishing actions that are processes (bhava), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (murta). This is the key distinction between th e imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb ver sus an action nominal.[citation needed] 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 t he 19th century via the study of the grammar of the Slavic languages. The earlie st use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1853.[1] Modern usage[edit] 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 infor mation, 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 e aten", 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 ove rt inflection, derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammati cally required markers of those aspects. For example, the K'iche' language spoke n in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect;[2][3] Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le ?, -zhe ?,

zi- ?, and -gu ? to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, a nd experiential aspects,[4] and also marks aspect with adverbs;[5] and English m arks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle a nd the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle. Even language s that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs, however, c an convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other syntactic constructio ns.[6] 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[edit] The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is be tween perfective aspect and imperfective aspect. This is the basic aspectual dis tinction 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 (pass simple) a nd 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 repeate d or habitual event (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuous aspect for events of short-term duration and to habitual aspect for longer terms). For eve nts of short durations in the past, the distinction often coincides with the dis tinction 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. fi nished 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 habi t that has no point of completion) and perfective ("I called him once" - an acti on completed), although the construct "used to" marks both habitual aspect and p ast 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 d istinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") cor respond to the imperfect and perfect of the French verb "savoir" and the Spanish equivalent "saber." Aspect vs. tense[edit] The Germanic languages combine the concept of aspect with the concept of tense. Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutr al, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in the past tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfectiv e that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of te nse 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 eate n yet?" and "Did you eat yet?". Another is in the pluperfect ("I had eaten"), wh ich sometimes represents the combination of past tense and perfect ("I was full because I had already eaten"), but sometimes simply represents a past action tha t is anterior to another past action ("A little while after I had eaten, my frie nd 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 loca ting an event or state in time, the way tense does, aspect describes "the intern al temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of

conceiving the flow of the process itself".[7] English aspectual distinctions i n 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 morpho logy. For example, the very frequently used aorist, though a functional preterit e in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunct ive and optative. The perfect in all moods is used as an aspectual marker, conve ying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. ???? - I see (present); e?d?? - I saw (aorist); ??da - 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[edit] Main article: Lexical aspect There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexica l aspect. Lexical aspect is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement ph rase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspec t are different from those of grammatical aspect. Typical distinctions are betwe en states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a p icture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or semelfactive, events ("I s neezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, stat es and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used in English with a p repositional 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, acco mplishments and semelfactives have telic situation aspect, while states and acti vities 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 achiev ements and semelfactives do not. Indicating aspect[edit] 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 aspec t much more saliently than time. Prominent in this category are Chinese and Amer ican Sign Language, which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively o n optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect to time. In other language groups, for example in most modern Indo-European languages (excep t 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, wher eas other languages mark them morphologically, and still others with auxiliaries (e.g., English). In literary Arabic (??????, al-Fusha) the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammaria

ns whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both . The "Past Verb" (??? ????, fi'l maadiy) denotes an event (???, hadath) complet ed in the past, but says nothing about the relation of this past event to presen t status. For example, "???", wasala, "he arrived", indicates that arrival occur red 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 a spect of the past event except insofar as completeness can be considered aspectu al. This "Past Verb" is clearly similar if not identical to the Greek Aorist, wh ich 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 Simi larity" (??? ???????, 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 incomplete ness implied by the tense: ???? "yadribu", he strikes/is striking/will strike/et c. Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting "???"? "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 lexi cal and syntactic devices. Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. One major change from al-Fusha is the use of a prefix particle (? "bi" in most dialects) to explicitly mark pro gressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: ?????, bi-yiktib, he is now writing, w rites 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. T he inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g. Esperanto uses ek-, e.g. Mi ekmangas, "I am beginning to eat.") and inchoative and ingress ive aspects identify a change of state (The flowers started blooming) or the sta rt of an action (He started running). Aspects of stage continue through progress ive, 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 t ook 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 l anguage. Although languages that are described as having imperfective and perfec tive aspects agree in most cases in their use of these aspects, they may not agr ee in every situation. For example: Some languages have additional grammatical aspects. Spanish and Ancient Greek, f or example, have a perfect (not the same as the perfective), which refers to a s tate 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 a s 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 o mitted 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 l e and (especially) the imperfective zhe. For some verbs in some languages, the difference between perfective and imperfec tive conveys an additional meaning difference; in such cases, the two aspects ar e typically translated using separate verbs in English. In Greek, for example, t he imperfective sometimes adds the notion of "try to do something" (the so-calle d conative imperfect); hence the same verb, in the imperfective (present or impe rfect) and aorist, respectively, is used to convey look and see, search and find

, listen and hear. (For example, ?????e? ekouomen "we listened" vs. ????sae? ekous amen "we heard".) Spanish has similar pairs for certain verbs, such as (imperfec t and preterite, respectively) saba "I knew" vs. supe "I found out", poda "I was a ble to" vs. pude "I succeeded (in doing something)", quera "I wanted to" vs. quis e "I tried to", no quera "I did not want to" vs. no quise "I refused (to do somet hing)". Such differences are often highly language-specific. Aspect by language[edit] English[edit] The English tense aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, present a nd 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 Cit y", 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 furt her for progressive aspect (also called continuous aspect), for the perfect, or for both. These two aspectual forms are also referred to as BE +ING[8] and HAVE +EN,[9] respectively, which avoids what may be unfamiliar terminology. Aspects Present Present Present Present of the present tense: simple (not progressive, not perfect): "I eat" progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating" perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten" perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"

(While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfe ct 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 auxi liary 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" (in finitive with progressive aspect), "(to) have eaten" (infinitive with perfect as pect), "having eaten" (present participle or gerund with perfect aspect), etc. T he perfect infinitive can further be governed by modal verbs to express various meanings, mostly combining modality with past reference: "I should have eaten" e tc. In particular, the modals will and shall and their subjunctive forms would a nd should are used to combine future or hypothetical reference with aspectual me aning: Simple future, simple conditional: "I will eat", "I would eat" Future progressive, conditional progressive: "I will be eating", "I would be eat ing" Future perfect, conditional perfect: "I will have eaten", "I would have eaten" Future perfect progressive, conditional perfect progressive: "I will have been e ating", "I would have been eating" The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex. They may refe r to the viewpoint of the speaker: I was walking down the road when I met Michael Jackson's lawyer. (Speaker viewpo int in middle of action) I have traveled widely, but I have never been to Moscow. (Speaker viewpoint at e nd 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 U ses of English verb forms. English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. Us ed 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 AfricanAmerican 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[edit] Although Standard German does not have aspects, many Upper German languages, all West Central German languages, and some more vernacular German languages do mak e one aspectual distinction, and so do the colloquial languages of many regions, the so-called German regiolects. While officially discouraged in schools and se en as 'bad language', local English teachers like the distinction, because it co rresponds well with the English continuous form. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb "sein" (to be) followed by the preposition "am" and the infinitiv e, or the nominalized verb. The latter two are phonetically indistinguishable; i n 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 writ ten down or printed, even in quotations or direct speech. If written, the first form (the infinitive) is preferred. 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[edit] Main article: Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages The Slavic languages make a clear distinction between perfective and imperfectiv e aspects; it was in relation to these languages that the modern concept of aspe ct originally developed. In Slavic languages, a given verb is, in itself, either perfective or imperfecti ve. Consequently each language contains many pairs of verbs, corresponding to ea ch other in meaning, except that one expresses perfective aspect and the other i mperfective. (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 gene rally be used with the meaning of a present tense their present-tense forms in f act have future reference. An example of such a pair of verbs, from Polish, is g iven below: Infinitive (and dictionary form): pisac ("to write", imperfective); napisac ("to write", perfective) Present/simple future tense: pisze ("writes"); napisze ("will write", perfective ) Compound future tense (imperfective only): bedzie pisac ("will write, will be wr iting") Past tense: pisal ("was writing, used to write, wrote", imperfective); napisal (

"wrote", perfective) In at least the East Slavic and West Slavic languages, there is a three-way aspe ct differentiation for verbs of motion, with two forms of imperfective, determin ate 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 imper fective 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) v erbs of motion. When prefixes are attached to Russian verbs of motion, they beco me more-or-less normal imperfective/perfective pairs, although the prefixes are generally attached to the indeterminate imperfective to form the prefixed imperf ective and to the determinate imperfective to form the prefixed perfective. For example, prefix ???- + indeterminate ?????? = ?????????; and prefix ???- + determi nate ???? = ?????? (to arrive (on foot)).