Grammatical Aspect Of Language
Grammatical
Aspect Of Language
Aspect is grammatical category
along with tense and mood. It is a formal property of language which differs
from one language to another in a way a language distinguishes a large number
of formal aspect, while others distinguish none at all. Even languages that do
not mark aspect formally ,however, can convey such distinctions by the use of
adverbials, serial verb construction or other means. It is clear that not all
languages have inflections or special words to mark aspect but most languages
can express the meanings which are embedded in the aspectual categories.
These are different views on
aspect by different grammarians, among them, for example, is hartmann and
strok’s views, who define aspect as ‘’ a grammatical category of the verb
marked by prefixes, suffixes or internal vowel changes indicating not so much
is location in the tense but the duration and type of the action expressed.
Comrie states that ‘’ aspect are
different ways of viewing the internal temporal consistuency of a situations.
‘’while smith’’has an interesting view on aspect in his ‘’camera-metaphor’’, he
mentions that ‘’aspectual viewpoint function like the lens of a camera, making
object vible to the receiver. Situations are the object on which viewpoints
lenses are trained.
Quirk et al. And greenbaum and
quirk view aspect as ‘’ a grammatical category which reflects the way in which
the verb is regarded or experienced with respect to time.
While gramely and patzold explain
that aspect is not concerned with relating the time of the situations to any
other time point, but rather with the internal temporal consistuency of the
situations.
Richards et al. Identify aspect
as that grammatical category which deals with how the event described by a verb
is viewed such as it is in progress, habitual, repeated, momentary,etc. He also
mentions that aspect may be indicated by refixes, suffixer or other categories
of a verb.
The above definitions emphasize
the relationship between aspect and the duration of the action denoted by the
verb. Among all these definitions, the definition by comrie is the most
comprehensive. It draws a clear distinction between ‘aspect and tense’. One can
realize the difference between situation-internal time (aspect) and
situation-external time(tense).
From these it can be concluded that aspect
refers to the internal temporal consistuency of an event or the manner in which
the action of the verb is distributed through the time-space continuum.
It
can be noticed that ‘aspect’ does not occur alone but it always occurs with
‘tense’. They relate the happening described by the verb to time in the past,
present, or future. Aspect is a difficult concept to grasp because it tends to
conflate with the concept of tense.
The main diference between tense
and aspect is that the former is concerned with relating a situation to a
time-point, that is , situation-external time. While the letter deals with the
internal temporal consistuency of a situation, that is, situation-internal
time.
It is worth mentioning that time
refers to the possibility for relating situations to the time in discussing the
internal temporal contour of a situation, for instance, in discussing whether
it is possible to be represented as a point or as a stretch on the time line.
The internal temporal contour of a situation refers to the conceptual basis for
the notion of aspect which indicates the grammaticalisation of expression of
internal temporal consituency. Thus , the difference between
(1) a. John was singing
b. john is singging
in english is one of tense which
distinguishes a location before the present moment and a location including the
present moment, while the difference between :
(2) a. John was singging
b. john sang
is one of aspect because both
sentence are in the past tense, while they indicate different asf cts (2a) is
in the progressive aspect, it shows the non-completion of the singging while
(2b) is in the perfrective aspect which determines the completion of the
action.
Tense and aspect are two
interrelated element that can not be studied separately. Dahl regasd tense as
deictic categories which relate time points to the moment of speech while
aspect is as non-deictic category, that is, in relates time point to the moment
of event.
Grammatical aspect is represented
differently in different languages. For instance, in some languages, it is
realized by prefixes, suffixes or other categories of the verb. There are
different views concerning the number of the type of grammatical aspect in
english. Some grammarians distinguished two main types of aspect, for example,
comrie classifies grammatical aspect into 2 main types : perfective and
imperfective : the former indicates the situations of short duration while the
letter indicates the situations of long duration. While others draw a
distinction between four types of grammatical aspect, these are : simple,
perfect, progressive and perfect progessive aspect. For instance, celce-murcia and
larsen-freeman distinguish four types of grammatical aspect in english :
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