In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
By contrast, the "Verb of Similarity" (الْفِعْل الْمُضَارِع al-fiʿl al-muḍāriʿ), 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: يَضْرِبُ (yaḍribu, he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.).
Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting أَمْر amr, command or imperative, which is traditionally considered as denoting future events.)
Important qualifications: The English tense–aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, past and non-past, the latter of which is also known as the present-future or, more commonly and less formally, simply the present.
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: The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex.
They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker: But they can have other illocutionary forces or additional modal components: English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions.
This is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb sein ("to be") followed by the preposition and article am (=an dem) and the infinitive, which German uses in many constructions as a verbal noun.
It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb zijn ("to be"), followed by aan het and the gerund (which in Dutch matches the infinitive).
For example: The second type is formed by one of the conjugated auxiliary verbs liggen ("to lie"), zitten ("to sit"), hangen ("to hang"), staan ("to stand") or lopen ("to walk"), followed by the preposition te and the infinitive.
Perfective verbs cannot generally be used with the meaning of a present tense – their present-tense forms in fact have future reference.
); and prefix при- pri- + determinate идти́ idtí = прийти prijtí (to arrive (on foot), pf.).
The aspects of Hindi when conjugated into their personal forms can be put into five grammatical moods: indicative, presumptive, subjunctive, contrafactual, and imperative.
[12] There are a couple of verbs which can be used as the copula to the aspectual participles: होना (honā) [to be, happen], रहना (rêhnā) [to stay, remain], आना (ānā) [to come], and जाना (jānā) [to go].
For example, the (implicit) purpose of shooting is to kill, such that: In rare cases corresponding telic and atelic forms can be unrelated by meaning.
Examples: There are derivational suffixes for verbs, which carry frequentative, momentane, causative, and inchoative aspect meanings.
According to Vendler, inherent aspect can be categorized into four different types: activities, achievements, accomplishments, and states.
The imperfective clitics index one of the core arguments, usually the nominative subject, and follow the rightmost element in a syntactic structure larger than the word.
This example below shows these two imperfective aspect markers giving different meanings to similar sentences.
Unknown glossing abbreviation(s) (help);In Torau, the suffix -to, which must attach to a preverbal particle, may indicate similar meaning to the perfective aspect.
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.
Non-stative verbs typically can optionally be marked for the progressive, habitual, completive, or irrealis aspect.
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.
[citation needed] Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative ("to begin to..."), predispositional ("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").
They remain semantically transitive, typically assuming an object made prominent using a topic marker or mentioned in a previous sentence.