Editing Grammatical aspect (section)

==Basic concept==

===History===
The Indian linguist [[Yaska]] ({{circa|7th century BCE}}) dealt with grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that are processes (''bhāva''), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (''mūrta''). This is the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal.{{Citation needed|date=August 2011}}

Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages also showed an interest in aspect, but the idea did not enter into the modern Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century via the study of the grammar of the [[Slavic languages]]. The earliest use of the term recorded in the [[Oxford English Dictionary]] dates from 1853.<ref name="Binnick1991">
{{cite book|author=Robert I. Binnick|title=Time and the verb: a guide to tense and aspect|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=A1fSUowGY8kC&pg=PA135|year=1991|publisher=Oxford University Press US|isbn=978-0-19-506206-9|pages=135–6 |access-date=12 August 2011}}
</ref>

===Modern usage===
Aspect is often confused with the closely related concept of [[Grammatical tense|tense]], because they both convey information about time. While tense relates the time of [[referent]] to some other time, commonly the speech event, aspect conveys other temporal information, such as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense refers to {{em|temporally when}} while aspect refers to {{em|temporally how}}. Aspect can be said to describe the texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single point of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence of discrete points in time, etc., whereas tense indicates its location in time.

For example, consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". All are in the [[present tense]], indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence (''eat'', ''am'', and ''have''). Yet since they differ in aspect, each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present.

Grammatical aspect is a {{em|formal}} property of a [[language]], distinguished through overt [[inflection]], [[derivational affix]]es, or independent words that serve as grammatically required [[marker (linguistics)|marker]]s of those aspects. For example, the [[Kʼicheʼ language]] spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes {{lang|quc|k}}- and {{lang|quc|x}}- to mark [[Incompletive aspect|incompletive]] and [[completive aspect]];<ref name="pye1">{{cite journal | journal=Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics |editor1=Stacey Stowers |editor2=Nathan Poell | volume=26 | year=2008 | last=Pye | first=Clifton | publisher=University of Kansas |title=Mayan Morphosyntax}}</ref><ref name="pye2">Pye, Clifton (2001). "The Acquisition of Finiteness in Kʼicheʼ Maya". ''BUCLD 25: Proceedings of the 25th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development'', pp. 645–656. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.</ref> [[Mandarin Chinese]] has the aspect markers -{{translit|cmn|le}} {{lang|cmn|了}}, -{{translit|cmn|zhe}} {{lang|cmn|着}}, {{translit|cmn|zài}}- {{lang|cmn|在}}, and -{{translit|cmn|guò}} {{lang|cmn|过}} to mark the [[perfective]], [[durative]] [[Stative verb|stative]], durative [[Progressive aspect|progressive]], and [[Experiential aspect|experiential]] aspects,<ref name="lithomp">Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson (1981). "Aspect". ''Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar''. Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 184–237.</ref> and also marks aspect with [[adverb]]s;<ref name="zhangandzhang">{{cite journal | last1=Zhang | first1=Yaxu | last2=Zhang | first2=Jingting | s2cid=35873020 | title=Brain responses to agreement violations of Chinese grammatical aspect | date=2 July 2008 | journal=[[NeuroReport]] | volume=19 | issue=10 | pmid=18580575 | doi=10.1097/WNR.0b013e328302f14f | pages=1039–43}}</ref> and English marks the [[continuous aspect]] with the verb ''to be'' coupled with [[present participle]] and the [[perfect (grammar)|perfect]] with the verb ''to have'' coupled with [[past participle]]. Even languages that do not mark aspect [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphologically]] or through [[auxiliary verb]]s, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other [[Syntax|syntactic]] constructions.<ref name="gabriele">{{cite journal | last=Gabriele | first=Alison | title=Transfer and Transition in the L2 Acquisition of Aspect | year=2008 | journal=Studies in Second Language Acquisition | pages=6}}</ref>

Grammatical aspect is distinguished from [[lexical aspect]] or ''Aktionsart'', which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the situation that the verb describes.