Grammatical aspect

In linguistics, aspect is the grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by the verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded together with unitary, without acknowledgment to all 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 guide 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 representation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the effect 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 do believe eaten".

Different languages reform grammatical aspectual distinctions; some such(a) as 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 totenses: 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 discussing of the Slavic languages; here verbs often arise 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

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Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages also showed an interest in aspect, but the image did not enter into the contemporary Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century via the examine of the grammar of the Slavic languages. The earliest use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1853.

Aspect is often confused with the closely related concept of tense, because they bothinformation approximately time. While tense relates the time of referent to some other time, ordinarily the speech event, aspect conveys other temporal information, such(a) as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense intended to temporally when while aspect subjected to temporally how. Aspect can be said to describe the texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. 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". any are in the present tense, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence eat, am, and have. Yet since they differ in aspect used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters conveys different information or points of opinion as to how the action pertains to the present.

Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a K'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to brand incompletive and completive aspect; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le 了, -zhe 着, zài- 在, and -guò 过 to types 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, cansuch 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.