Editing Grammatical aspect (section)

==Aspect vis-à-vis tense==
The [[Germanic languages]] combine the concept of aspect with the concept of [[grammatical tense|tense]]. Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in the past tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of [[perfective and imperfective|perfective vs. imperfective]] that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly. One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten?" and "Did you eat?".

In European languages, rather than locating an event time, the way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the process itself".<ref name=Comrie>Bernard Comrie, 1976. ''Aspect''. Cambridge University Press</ref> English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc.

In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the very frequently used [[aorist]], though a functional [[preterite]] in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moods is used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. {{lang|grc|ὁράω}} – I see (present); {{lang|grc|εἶδον}} – I saw (aorist); {{lang|grc|οἶδα}} – I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect). Turkish has a same/similar aspect, such as in <span dir="ltr" lang="tr">Görmüş bulunuyorum/durumdayım</span>, where <span dir="ltr" lang="tr">görmüş</span> means "having seen" and <span dir="ltr" lang="tr">bulunuyorum/durumdayım</span> means "I am in the state".{{Citation needed|date=May 2023}} 

In many Sino-Tibetan languages, such as [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]], verbs lack grammatical markers of tense, but are rich in aspect (Heine, Kuteva 2010,{{Full citation needed|date=December 2018}} p.&nbsp;10). Markers of aspect are attached to verbs to indicate aspect. Event time is inferred through use of these aspectual markers, along with optional inclusion of adverbs.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Liu|first=Meichun|editor1-first=William S-Y|editor1-last=Wang|editor2-first=Chaofen|editor2-last=Sun|date=2015-04-01|title=Tense and Aspect in Mandarin Chinese|url=https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199856336.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199856336-e-70|access-date=2021-08-14|website=The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics|language=en|doi=10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199856336.001.0001|isbn=978-0-19-985633-6}}</ref>