Aspect

Aspect is an inflectional category-system of verbs that has to do with the internal temporal constituency of an event. It is a cover term for those properties of a sentence that constitute the temporal structure of the event denoted by the verb and its arguments. Not all verbs have the same aspectual properties and so may belong to different aspectual classes. The aspect of a sentence is in many languages expressed syntactically and/or morpho-phonologically.

Example

the opposition between the perfective (I have gone), the imperfective (I went) and the progressive aspect (I am going) in English. Also, it is considered a matter of aspect whether or not the event is bounded (e.g. I ran out of the room) or unbounded (e.g. I ran).

Categories

• perfective aspect
• imperfective aspect
• habitual aspect
• progressive aspect
• continuous aspect

Link

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Dowty, D. 1979. Word meaning and Montague grammar: the semantics of verbs and times in generative semantics and in Montague's PTQ, Reidel, Dordrecht
• Tenny, C. 1987. Grammaticalizing aspect and affectedness, MIT linguistics dissertations.
• Verkuyl, H.J. 1993. A theory of aspectuality: the interaction between temporal and atemporal structure, Cambridge University Press, Cambrigde
• Verkuyl, H.J. 1972. On the compositional nature of the aspects, Reidel, Dordrecht.

Other languages

Czech vid German Aspekt Russian вид Spanish [[aspecto]