Gramatical aspectos

Grammatical aspect

In linguistics, the grammatical aspect (sometimes called viewpoint aspect) of a verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. More specifically, aspect conveys a sense of the degree of progression of the action being described. Commonly the distinction is made between whether the action is completed ("I have eaten") or on-going ("I ameating"), although this is not the only distinction possible.
Aspect can be quite a difficult concept to convey and understand intuitively. Because they both convey some sense of "time" to the audience, aspect is often confused with the closely-related concept of tense. While tense relates the time of the action to the time of speaking, aspect conveys to the audience other temporal information (suchas duration/ completeness/frequency of the action) as it relates to the time of action (not the time of speaking). While there are generally considered to be only three tenses (present, past and future) many more types of aspect are possible.
Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or aktionsart, which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the natureof the event that the verb describes, whereas grammatical aspect is more often determined by inflectional morphology, aspect markers, or adverbs and other syntactic constructions.
Aspect vs. tense
Aspect is a somewhat difficult concept to grasp for the speakers of most modern Germanic languages, because they tend to conflate the concept of aspect with the concept of tense. Although Englishlargely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect and progressive perfect) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is common in most other languages. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly.
In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by tense. Forexample, the very frequently used aorist tense, though a functional preterite tense in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect tense in all moods is used solely as an aspect marker and not, ironically, as a tense, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. ὁράω - I see (present); εἶδον - I saw (aorist); οἶδα - I am in a state ofhaving seen = I know (perfect).
Many Sino-Tibetan languages, like Mandarin, lack grammatical tense but are rich in aspect.
Lexical vs. grammatical aspect
It is extremely important to distinguish between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect. Lexical aspect is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally in most languages. The distinctionsmade as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect, usually relating to situation aspect rather than viewpoint aspect. 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"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically.For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used with a prepositional for-phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called Aktionsart, especially by German and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in Athabaskan languages.
One of thefactors in situation aspect is telicity. Telicity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb phrase. Achievements and accomplishments have telic situation aspect, while states, activities and semelfactives have atelic situation aspect.
The other factor in situation aspect is duration,...