Questions tagged [aspect]
Marking of the temporal structure of an event.
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Do Spanish speakers prefer certain words for certain aspects, like in Russian?
In an effort to clearly delineate durar and tardar to my Spanish students, I have been searching for some usage notes and I was not satisfied with anything I found.
Instead, I was wondering if these ...
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Is there any language that doesn't express Tense but allows "aspectual coercion"?
Mandarin Chinese appears to be a language that may not express tense (at least in the way I will define below), and it does not seem to allow aspectual coercion.
By not expressing Tense I mean, such ...
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Is there really a perfect tense?
I went through my entire English and French educations learning nothing about aspect. We only learned about tenses and a little bit about mood. With that K12* vocabulary, we'd call J'avais mangé l'...
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Do other languages have an "irreversible aspect"?
Like many languages, Lingála combines tense, aspect, and mood into a single TAM marking. Three of these TAMs pertain to the past:
a-kɛnd-ákí "he left earlier today" (hodiernal/recent past)
a-kɛnd-áká ...
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Do languages with high use of grammatical aspect generally lack grammatical tense?
From my understanding of Chinese, the language lacks any sort of grammatical tense but is instead very aspect driven when describing actions.
Is this a reoccurring pattern among languages with a high ...
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Is there a difference between a preterite and an aorist?
I am reading about aorist and preterite verb forms. It seems that they are both forms which express perfective aspect and past tense. Is the difference between them simply in differing terminology or ...
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habitual aspect in english
In discussions of AAVE, people frequently bring up the "habitual be", as in
(1) He be working.
Usually, they use this as an example of something that Standard English doesn't have. This Wikipedia ...
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What is permansive aspect?
I'm having a great deal of difficulty finding an adequate definition of "permansive aspect" on the web. I know what aspect is, more or less, but the meaning of the term "permansive" eludes me.
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Why is the verb "to need" and "to observe" always imperfective in Slavic languages?
I have been reading into Balto-Slavic languages and come across a problem. "To need" is always imperfective.
If I use the imperfective past verb, "to need," I am going to be still, presently needing ...
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How do languages with imperfect aspect typically convey distinctions between habitual, iterative, and progressive aspects?
How does languages with imperfect aspects typically convey distinctions between habitual, iterative, and progressive aspects?
In English, which does not mark its verbs for imperfect aspect, we have ...
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Phase and aspect
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How to distinguish between phase and aspect?
From one-language point of view
To take an example from Mandarin Chinese, I don't see a difference between a phrase with (cf. the quote from (...
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What is the name of the grammatical aspect conveyed by the English auxiliary "keep"?
All the English speakers in this group are familiar with the use of "keep" to convey persistent action, whether the action is repeated (He kept knocking the ball off the table) or maintained (The ball ...
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How did English and Portuguese develop the construction "have+pp"?
Native Portuguese speakers (myself included) often have a hard time dealing with the English present perfect tense-aspect.
In English, the present perfect is used for expressing past actions with ...
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How does aspect condition an ergative split?
I've never heard of a natural language that has ergative-absolutive marking alone. From what I've read, languages with said marking also have nominative-accusative marking, with the choice or "split"...
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Why does English have progressive aspect but German does not?
In english there are two ways to express a present action:
I go
I am going
However, In German there is really only one way to express a present action:
Ich gehe
If English is a ...
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What's the difference between iterative and frequentative aspects?
According to Wikipedia, the iterative aspect "expresses the repetition of an event", and the frequentative aspect "indicates repeated action".
Is there a difference or are they synonyms?
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Is there any difference between imperfect and imperfective aspect?
For those who came in late, "perfect" and "perfective" aspects are not the same. Perfect aspect pertains to actions that have been completed at the time referenced by the tense. So English past ...
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Does English have [ inchoative aspect ]?
Does English have the [ inchoative aspect ] ?
The first passage quoted below says NO, but the second says YES. . . . So I guess it depends on the definition.
Is English generally/usually said to (...
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Imperfective aspect or Future tense?
There is a suffix in Kyrgyz and I am not sure whether it denotes future tense or imperfective aspect. Are there any tests which can help me to distinguish between imperfective aspect and future tense?
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What's the best term for the group of concepts pertaining to verbs which includes tense, mood, and aspect?
There are many named concepts which relate to verbs across many languages.
The three most well known would be tense, aspect, and mood. But person, number, and voice are others, and there must be many ...
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PIE Aspect: (Im)perfective or (Non-)progressive?
According to Wikipedia Proto-Indo-European had four tense-aspects, the first being stative and the latter three being eventive: stative aspect, perfective aspect, and past and present tense of ...
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Grammatical Aspects
I am searching for two special types of grammatical aspects.
an aspect that has a meaning of 'try or attempt' ex: he made an attempt to ask.
an aspect that has a meaning of 'eventual or definitive' ...
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Why can verbs with imperfective morphology have a perfective meaning?
Some languages, e.g., Russian (1), Bulgarian (5) or Greek, show perfective readings of morphosyntactically imperfective verbs:
(1) Jakov ezdil na more dvazhdy za poslednij god.
J. rode.IPF ...
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How are the meanings of "you will" in English formally categorized?
As someone with only my vague instincts as a native speaker to go off of, I would expect the breakdown comes to something like:
"You will find that he is not too receptive to this sort of thing&...
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Alternatives to the Perfect Aspect
In English and (at least a portion of) other Indo-European languages the perfect aspect's foremost role is that of a discourse marker, marking prior events (or events beginning in the past and ...
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Are there any atelic ditransitive verbs (or verb phrases)?
I am wondering if there are any verbs/phrases that qualify both as ditransitive, and as atelic. The following shows the relevant tests. The satisfying verb/phrase should have the same * patterns as ...
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Having a hard time distinguishing between the simple and perfective aspects
It seems to me that the truth conditions for "David baked cookies" are identical to "David has baked cookies," in that both are true if at some moment of time in the past "...
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Question on the semantics of perfective form
I learn that in English, accomplishment predicates in the simple past (perfective) form usually entail that the event has reached its culmination point and the theme has entered into the result state. ...
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What aspect or feature do "over TIME" constructions have?
I have been searching around but as far as I can tell there is no established name for the aspect demonstrated by sentences such as:
"I'll read this report over the weekend."
"The debt has ...
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Grammatical Aspect and Lexical Aspect
This is my first question here. I normally participate in ELU. This question was posted yesterday https://english.stackexchange.com/q/289903/129806. The OP asks why They build a house next to mine. ...
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Is vav-consecutive unique to Hebrew?
Is vav-consecutive (converting perfect to imperfect and vice versa) unique to Biblical Hebrew or are there similar features in other languages, beyond the Afroasiatic family ?
See also this answer to ...
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Do auxiliary verbs always express different aspect/mood/tense?
Do auxiliary verbs always serve to express a mood or aspect that is different from simple indicative (or a tense)? Or are there cases where a sentence is in simple-indicative-present with the presence ...
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How can the perfective aspect apply to the present tense?
The perfective aspect is makes it so that the verb is viewed "outside" the verb, while imperfective verbs have an internal view into the verb.
This makes sense for past tense verbs, in order to view ...
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Can every language express any lexical aspect?
Wikipedia tells about the difference and relation between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. Whereas the lexical aspect is a specific way to put focus onto how to observe an event on a semantic ...
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Articles and books on aspects
I am searching for a good book on different aspects, which would include different types of aspects, not just perfective and imperfective, but deductive, inferential, retrospective, inceptive and many ...
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Do perfectives have to be successfully completed?
This post's answer says that "to need" is imperfective because a perfective must be successfully completed, while many of the responses to this post seem to imply that a perfective doesn't need to ...
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What is the relationship between perfectivity and the Classical Japanese conjunctive particle "-て" ("-te")?
In Classical Japanese, the auxiliary verb "-つ" ("-tsu") has a perfective function, indicating the completion of an action or process. According to Haruo Shirane's Classical Japanese: A Grammar, "-て" ("...
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Evidentiality: Aspect or Modality?
I was curious about evidentiality. In Turkish, evidentiality can be seen as {-mIş} suffix, but English does not have any suffix to express. Take a look at this sentence:
Babası ona yeni ayakkabı ...
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Online Modern Greek dictionary that puts imperfective and ("dependent") perfective verb stems together?
Does anyone know of a good online Modern Greek dictionary that puts imperfective and perfective (also called "dependent") verb stems together?
For instance, the present perfective of βλέπω /'vlepo/ "...
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Why grammaticalized perfective aspect marker is reduced to be used only in narrative style?
I am looking at a set of ballistic verbs like nak, phenk 'throw' in a minor Indo Aryan language spoken in Dravidian vicinity, where one verb of the set is reduced to light verb with perfective meaning,...
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Is pluperfect an aspect or a relative tense?
I have heard that pluperfect is simply past tense relative to a subsequent past moment rather than to the moment of the utterance. “I had blown out the candle” indicates that this event occurred ...
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Difference between ancient greek stative aspect and latin perfective aspect
In greek the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect are a combination of tense (present, past and future) and the stative aspect while the perfective aspect is used in combination with the past tense ...
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Difference between tense & Grammatical aspect?
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 ...
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Which language expresses aspect most similarly to English?
I suppose there are at least two ways to read this question (forgive me, I'm not a linguist, just a struggling practical language student):
1) Which languages' aspects map onto those in English most ...
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some basic questions about morphological aspect
According to the definition, morphological aspect presents the reported event or state of affairs as if viewed either from inside the event (‘in progress’) or outside the event (‘as a whole’).
For ...
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Question about habitual aspect and object licensing in English
In the following sentences:
(1) I am writing a letter.
(2) I wrote a letter yesterday.
(3) I will write a letter tomorrow.
(4) I often write letters.
(5) I like writing letters.
(6) It is my ...
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Is there a language where semantic aspect determines which tense is unmarked in a verb?
For every language there is a tense that is morphologically closest to the root, e.g. English present is more basic than perfect since perfect either adds a suffix -(e)d or has ablaut as tense marker. ...
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Evolution of perfective aspect from Sanskrit derivational suffix -ka in Modern Indo-Aryan languages
It is well attested that the Sanskrit derivational suffix -ka for adjectives together with the syntesized participle on nominals like krta-ka>done, evolved as the possessive case marker in modern Indo-...
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Any morphemes that affect valency and aspect?
I'll give an example of what I mean by this. In Tongan, there is a verbal suffix -'i that can either introduce a new argument or seemingly alter the aspect of the verb.
In (1) below, ‘the girl’ is an ...
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Perfective-imperfective aspectual system
I'm reading Dahl's article on aspect where it says that some of the major aspectual types are 1) progressive 2) habitual 3) completive 4) imperfective - perfective.
I'm wondering if there's a language ...
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