Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and only once occurring, without reference to any flow of time during the event. Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually 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 between the time of 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 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 while aspect refers to. 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 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 Kʼicheʼ language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers - 了, - 着, - 在, and - 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.
| Language | Perfective Aspect | Imperfective Aspect |
| Latin | Perfect | Imperfect |
| Spanish | Pretérito | Imperfect |
| French | Passé simple | Imperfect |
| Greek | Aorist | Imperfect |
| Portuguese | Pretérito perfeito | Imperfect |
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 the 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 vis-à-vis 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?".In European languages, rather than locating an event 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. Turkish has a same/similar aspect, such as in Görmüş bulunuyorum/durumdayım, where görmüş means "having seen" and bulunuyorum/durumdayım means "I am in the state".
In many Sino-Tibetan languages, such as Mandarin, verbs lack grammatical markers of tense, but are rich in aspect. Markers of aspect are attached to verbs to indicate aspect. Event time is inferred through use of these aspectual markers, along with optional inclusion of adverbs.
Lexical vis-à-vis grammatical aspect
There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect. Other terms for the contrast 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.