Prospective aspect

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In linguistics, the prospective aspect (abbreviated PROSP or PRSP) is a grammatical aspect describing an event that occurs subsequent to a given reference time. [1] One way to view tenses in English and many other languages is as a combination of a reference time (past, present, or future) in which a situation takes place, and the time of a particular event relative to the reference time (before, at, or after). As an example, consider the following sentence:

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during. Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows.

The verb would arrive expresses a combination of past reference time (the situation of my getting home, established as being in the past by the introductory clause) and an event (John's arrival) whose time of occurrence is subsequent to the reference time. Technically, this verb is said to be past tense, prospective aspect, with the tense expressing the time of the overall situation and the aspect expressing how the event itself is viewed, relative to the vantage point of the overall situation.

In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference with reference to the moment of speaking. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.

In English, the prospective aspect is most clearly distinguished in the past. The English future tense expressed by the auxiliary verb will refers to an event in the absolute future, regardless of the reference time or relative time of the event:

In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French aimera, meaning "will love", derived from the verb aimer ("love"). English does not have a future tense formed by verb inflection in this way, although it has a number of ways to express the future, particularly the construction with the auxiliary verb will or shall or is/am/are going to and grammarians differ in whether they describe such constructions as representing a future tense in English.

An auxiliary verb is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it appears, such as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany a main verb. The main verb provides the main semantic content of the clause. An example is the verb have in the sentence I have finished my lunch. Here, the main verb is finish, and the auxiliary have helps to express the perfect aspect. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries.

Note in particular the last sentence, with the same combination of tense and aspect as would arrive in the first sentence above, but with an emphasis on a time occurring in the absolute future (i.e. after the present time, rather than simply after the time of the situation being described).

However, in English it is possible to express the prospective aspect in tenses other than the past using the so-called going-to future : "He says he's going to finish soon. But yesterday he was also going to finish soon, and I'm sure in five weeks he'll still be going to finish soon."

<i>Going-to</i> future grammatical construction used in English

The going-to future is a grammatical construction used in English to refer to various types of future occurrences. It is made using appropriate forms of the expression to be going to. It is an alternative to other ways of referring to the future in English, such as the future construction formed with will – in some contexts the different constructions are interchangeable, while in others they carry somewhat different implications.

The opposite of the prospective aspect is the retrospective aspect , more commonly known as the "perfect":

The pluperfect is a type of verb form, generally treated as one of the tenses in certain languages, used to refer to an action at a time earlier than a time in the past already referred to. Examples in English are: "we had arrived"; "they had written".

It is actually possible to combine prospective and retrospective (perfect) aspects to produce a "prospective perfect", especially in the past:

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A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.

The present tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions in a time which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present tense, it is useful to imagine time as a line on which the past tense, the present and the future tense are positioned. The term present tense is usually used in descriptions of specific languages to refer to a particular grammatical form or set of forms; these may have a variety of uses, not all of which will necessarily refer to present time. For example, in the English sentence "My train leaves tomorrow morning", the verb form leaves is said to be in the present tense, even though in this particular context it refers to an event in future time. Similarly, in the historical present, the present tense is used to narrate events that occurred in the past.

The past tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to place an action or situation in past time. In languages which have a past tense, it thus provides a grammatical means of indicating that the event being referred to took place in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang, went and was.

Spanish verbs verb in the Spanish language

Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate to high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in Spanish conjugation.

The perfect tense or aspect is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is I have made dinner: although this gives information about a prior action, the focus is likely to be on the present consequences of that action. The word perfect in this sense means "completed".

The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with interior composition. The imperfective is used in language to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a general imperfective, others have distinct aspects for one or more of its various roles, such as progressive, habitual, and iterative aspects. The imperfective contrasts with the perfective aspect, which is used to describe actions viewed as a complete whole. In logical terms, the imperfective is generally defined as having the subinterval property; that is, a predicate φ is imperfective if and only if it follows from the truth of φ at an interval i that φ is true at all subintervals of i. Perfective aspect, on the other hand, is defined as having the "anti-subinterval" property; that is, a predicate φ is perfective if and only if it follows from the truth of φ at an interval i that φ is false at all subintervals of i.

English modal verbs Uninflected verbs in English

The modal verbs of English are a small class of auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality. They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness and by the fact that they do not take the ending -(e)s in the third-person singular.

Present perfect grammatical combination of the present tense and the perfect aspect

The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and perfect aspect that is used to express a past event that has present consequences. The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar to refer to forms like "I have left". The definition of Present perfect tense: Present perfect tense is used to talk about the completed action. example: he has sung in many countries.

The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as will have finished in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect, a grammatical aspect that views an event as prior and completed.

The conditional perfect is a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect. A typical example is the English would have written. The conditional perfect is used to refer to a hypothetical, usually counterfactual, event or circumstance placed in the past, contingent on some other circumstance. Like the present conditional, the conditional perfect typically appears in the apodosis in a conditional sentence.

Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time, the moment being considered in the context. In other words, the reference point is the moment of discourse or narration in the case of absolute tense, or a different moment in the case of relative tense.

Tense–aspect–mood or tense–modality–aspect are a group of grammatical categories that covers the expression of tense, aspect, and mood or modality. Some authors extend this term as tense–aspect–mood–evidentiality. In some languages, evidentiality and mirativity (surprise) may also be included.

Uses of English verb forms simple sentences for english learning

This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:

English clause syntax Clauses in English grammar

This article describes the syntax of clauses in the English language, that is, the ways of combining and ordering constituents such as verbs and noun phrases to form a clause.

English conditional sentences

As is typical for many languages, full conditional sentences in English consist of a condition clause or protasis specifying a condition or hypothesis, and a consequence clause or apodosis specifying what follows from that condition. The condition clause is a dependent clause, most commonly headed by the conjunction if, while the consequence is contained in the main clause of the sentence. Either clause may appear first.

Chichewa is the main lingua franca of central and southern Malawi and neighbouring regions. Like other Bantu languages it has a wide range of tenses. In terms of time, Chichewa tenses can be divided into present, recent past, remote past, near future, and remote future. The dividing line between near and remote tenses is not exact, however. Remote tenses cannot be used of events of today, but near tenses can be used of events earlier or later than today.

References

  1. ↑ Matthews, P. H. (1997) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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