Tense and Aspect

You may define three semantic features directly related to tense and aspect on this page as well as a syntactic feature related to verb forms. If additional features are needed for defining tense and aspect in your language,e.g., for defining arbitrary or quasi-semantic verb classes, you may define them on the Other Features page.

Semantic Features

tense

Comrie (1985:9) defines tense as "... grammaticalized expression of location in time". Which categories of tense are grammaticalized varies across languages. You may create a hierarchy of values for the feature tense as appropriate for your language. If your language does not have tense as a grammatical category, leave this section blank. You may define a hierarchy of values for the tense feature in one of two ways:

Select among the following common hierarchy elements and supplement with subtypes as needed, or
Build your own hierarchy.

Select among common hierarchy elements

Which of the following are tense hierarchy elements in your language?

past

present

future

nonpast (note: If present and/or future are also selected they are assumed to be subtypes of nonpast.)

nonfuture (note: If present and/or past are also selected they are assumed to be subtypes of nonfuture.)

Build your own tense hierarchy

Build your hierarchy from the top down starting with subtypes of the supertype: tense.

aspect

According to Kibort (2008), "The term 'aspect' designates the perspective taken on the internal temporal organisation of the situation, and so 'aspects' distinguish different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of the same situation (Comrie 1976:3ff,...; Bybee 2003:157). The 'situation' is meant here as [a] general term covering events, processes, states, etc., as expressed by the verb phrase or the construction. Unlike tense, which is situation-external time, aspect is situation-internal and non-deictic, as it is not concerned with relating the time of the situation to any other time point."

"Aspectual meaning of a clause can be broken up into two independent aspectual components (Smith 1991/1997): Aspectual viewpoint [and] Situation type ... ." Aspectual viewpoint conveys "the temporal perspective from which the situation is presented." Situation type "classifies the situation according to its temporal properties." (Kibort 2008)

See references below, especially Kibort (2008), for more detail.

Viewpoint Aspect

Viewpoint aspect is also commonly referred to as grammatical aspect. The most common viewpoint opposition is perfective/imperfective. You may create a hierarchy of values for the feature aspect, reflecting viewpoint aspect, as appropriate for your language. If your language does not have viewpoint aspect (also commonly referred to as grammatical aspect) as a grammatical category, leave this section blank.

Situation Aspect

The term "situation aspect" overlaps with, or subsumes, lexical aspect, inherent aspect and some uses of the term Aktionsart. Situation aspect values may be conveyed by the meaning of the verb or through overt morphological marking however situation aspect values may depend on qualities of verbal arguments or sentential adjuncts (for example). In this case the values are compositionally derived.

Note: The implementation of situation aspect is still under development; There is, as yet, no implementation of compositionally derived situation aspect. Currently the situation feature may be used to represent inherent lexical qualities or those conveyed through overt morphological marking. This more accurately reflects uses of the term "lexical aspect".

You may create a hierarchy of values for the feature situation, reflecting inherent or morphologically marked situation aspect. If this is not appropriate for your language, leave this section blank.

Syntactic Feature

form

In addition to the semantic features tense and aspect, your grammar may utilize a syntactic feature characterizing the form the verb takes. The form feature distinguishes finite from non-finite forms and can be used to constrain auxiliary complement forms. If not applicable, you may leave this section blank.

If you have indicated on the word order page that your language has auxiliary verbs, your grammar will include finite and nonfinite as values of form. If your language does not have auxiliaries you may still include finite and nonfinite as values of form in your grammar:
My language has no auxiliaries but does make a syntactically relevant finite/non-finite distinction.

It is often the case that languages have multiple non-finite forms, e.g., English: infinitive, past participle, present participle. If applicable, you may expand the hierarchy of verb form values in your grammar by providing subtypes of finite and nonfinite:

nonfinite:

finite:

References

Smith, Carlota. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect. (Second Edition). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Revised version of Smith, Carlota. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).