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In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as 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 the event. Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows.
In grammar, a frequentative form of a word is one that indicates repeated action but is not to be confused with iterative aspect. The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a frequentative. The frequentative is no longer productive in English, unlike in some language groups, such as Finno-Ugric, Balto-Slavic, and Turkic.
The preterite or preterit is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or the aorist. When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt even in perfective past meanings.
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"). The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under consideration.
The simple past, past simple, or past indefinite, in English equivalent to the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however, there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms.
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang, went and washed. Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which uses auxiliary verbs as well as an imperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languages inflect the verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words, such as "yesterday" or "last week" etc to indicate that something took place in the past.
Aorist verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the Indo-European grammatical tradition, such as Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Armenian, the South Slavic languages, Georgian, and Pashto, also have forms referred to as aorist.
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 continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action or state in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used 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.
Belizean Creole is an English-based creole language spoken by the Belizean Creole people. It is closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole, San Andrés-Providencia Creole, and Jamaican Patois.
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 finished". The forms are present because they use the present tense of the auxiliary verb have, and perfect because they use that auxiliary in combination with the past participle of the main verb.
The gnomic, also called neutral, generic, or universal aspect, mood, or tense, is a grammatical feature that expresses general truths or aphorisms.
In linguistics, semelfactives are a type of aktionsart or lexical aspect, which is a property of verbs and other predicates representing the temporal flow of an event. A semelfactive describes a very brief event which ends by returning to its initial state, making it capable of being repeated. Semelfactive verbs in English include "blink", "sneeze", and "knock".
Tense–aspect–mood or tense–modality–aspect is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different languages.
In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect, not to be confused with iterative aspect or frequentative aspect, specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily. As such, the habitual aspect provides structural information on the nature of the subject referent, "John smokes" being interpretable as "John is a smoker", "Enjoh habitually gets up early in the morning" as "Enjoh is an early bird". The habitual aspect is a type of imperfective aspect, which does not depict an event as a single entity viewed only as a whole but instead specifies something about its internal temporal structure.
Navajo is a "verb-heavy" language – it has a great preponderance of verbs but relatively few nouns. In addition to verbs and nouns, Navajo has other elements such as pronouns, clitics of various functions, demonstratives, numerals, postpositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, among others. Harry Hoijer grouped all of the above into a word-class he called particles. Navajo has no words that would correspond to adjectives in English grammar: verbs provide the adjectival functionality.
The habitual aspect is a form of expression connoting repetition or continuous existence of a state of affairs. In standard English, for present reference there is no special grammatical marker of habitual aspect; the simple present is used, as in I go there. However, for past reference English uses the simple past form or either of two marked constructions: used to as in we used to go there , and would as in back then we would go there .
Discontinuous past is a category of past tense of verbs argued to exist in some languages which have a meaning roughly characterizable as "past and not present" or "past with no present relevance". The phrase "discontinuous past" was first used in English in 1969, though not in the same sense; its use in the sense described here dates to an article by the linguists Vladimir Plungian and Johan von der Auwera published in 2006.
References
- ↑ Smith, C. S. (1991). The parameter of aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer, p28.
- ↑ Bertinetto, Pier Marco, and Alessandro Lenci. 2012. "Habituality, Pluractionality, and Imperfectivity." In The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, edited by Robert I. Binnick, 852–880. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ↑ Tatevosov, Sergej. 2002. "The parameter of actionality." Linguistic Typology 6: pp317-401.
- ↑ Bhat, D.N.S. 1999. The prominence of tense, aspect and mood. Benjamins. pp53ff
- ↑ p160 in Bybee, J., R. Perkins, & W. Pagliuca, The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- ↑ p236 in S.C. Dik. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar, part I The Structure of the Clause. Berlin: Mouton.
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