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I know this question has been posed before, and I know also that there were different versions of putting it depending on models and different kinds of reasoning. What I want to understand, is the main difference between Tense and Aspect (grammatical one), provided that some languages exhibit morphological tense only in the Aorist, and the past and present are expressed & (methodologically) referred to as perfective and imperfective respectively.

What would be the difference here between tense and aspect?

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  • "".. provided some languages exhibit .." Which languages? How do they "exhibit tense"? What do you mean by "Aorist"? And who's doing the methodological referring here? Some examples would be helpful, because your question isn't clear. – jlawler Jul 8 '18 at 13:25
  • The language I was referring to is Berber, my native language, (spoken in Northern Africa). This language has three different aspects: Perfective, imperfective, and aorist. What I mean by aorist is the aspect used for future. Its morphology is often realized with the affix 'ad' (meaning 'will'). What I meant by methodology is the difference among linguists working in the field of generative theory and structuralist or functionalist theory. – Tsutsu Jul 8 '18 at 17:53
  • The first stream of opinions (I refer to Ouali, 2011, for example) incorporate both Aspect & Tense, whereas the second stream of opinions (I refer to Lefkioui, 2017) (structuralists) refer only to aspect. – Tsutsu Jul 8 '18 at 17:54
  • The language in question has, as I said perfective (imnz uRrum 'the bread was sold'), imperfective (itmnza uRrum 'the bread is being sold/sells), and aorist (ad imnz uRrum 'the bread will be sold'). – Tsutsu Jul 8 '18 at 17:54
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    The space did not allow to write all these ideas in one comment so I wrote them separately. The original question is the difference between Tense and Aspect no matter what the language or how its morphology or syntax works. – Tsutsu Jul 8 '18 at 17:56

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