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Grammatical tense

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  • Grammatical tense

  • Contents

    1 Grammatical aspect 11.1 Basic concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

    1.1.1 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1.2 Modern usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

    1.2 Common aspectual distinctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.3 Aspect vs. tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.4 Lexical vs. grammatical aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.5 Indicating aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31.6 Aspect by language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

    1.6.1 English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41.6.2 German vernacular and colloquial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.6.3 Slavic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.6.4 Romance languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.6.5 Finnic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61.6.6 Austronesian languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61.6.7 Creole languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71.6.8 American Sign Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

    1.7 Terms for various aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71.8 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81.9 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81.10 Other references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91.11 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

    2 Grammatical mood 102.1 Realis moods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

    2.1.1 Indicative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102.2 Irrealis moods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

    2.2.1 Subjunctive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112.2.2 Conditional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112.2.3 Optative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122.2.4 Imperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122.2.5 Jussive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122.2.6 Potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

    i

  • ii CONTENTS

    2.2.7 Inferential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122.3 Other moods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

    2.3.1 Interrogative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122.3.2 Deity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

    2.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132.6 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

    3 Pluperfect 143.1 Meaning of the pluperfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143.2 Examples from various languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

    3.2.1 Greek and Latin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143.2.2 English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153.2.3 Other Germanic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153.2.4 German . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153.2.5 Dutch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163.2.6 Romance languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163.2.7 Slavic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163.2.8 Other languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

    3.3 Table of forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173.4 Dierent perfect construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

    4 Tenseaspectmood 194.1 Creoles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

    4.1.1 Hawaiian Creole English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194.2 Modern Greek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204.3 Slavic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

    4.3.1 Russian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204.4 Romance languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

    4.4.1 French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214.4.2 Italian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214.4.3 Portuguese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214.4.4 Spanish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

    4.5 Germanic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224.5.1 German . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224.5.2 Danish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224.5.3 Dutch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224.5.4 Icelandic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234.5.5 English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

  • CONTENTS iii

    4.6 Basque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264.7 Hawaiian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264.8 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264.9 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

    5 Uses of English verb forms 285.1 Inected forms of verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285.2 Verbs in combination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285.3 Tenses, aspects and moods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

    5.3.1 Tenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295.3.2 Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295.3.3 Moods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

    5.4 Active and passive voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315.5 Negation and questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325.6 Modal verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325.7 Uses of verb combination types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

    5.7.1 Simple present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325.7.2 Present progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335.7.3 Present perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335.7.4 Present perfect progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345.7.5 Simple past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355.7.6 Past progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355.7.7 Past perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365.7.8 Past perfect progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365.7.9 Simple future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375.7.10 Future progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375.7.11 Future perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375.7.12 Future perfect progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385.7.13 Simple conditional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385.7.14 Conditional progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385.7.15 Conditional perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.7.16 Conditional perfect progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

    5.8 Have got and can see . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.9 Been and gone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.10 Conditional sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405.11 Expressions of wish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405.12 Indirect speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415.13 Dependent clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425.14 Uses of nonnite verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

    5.14.1 Bare innitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425.14.2 To-innitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435.14.3 Present participle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

  • iv CONTENTS

    5.14.4 Past participle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455.14.5 Gerund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465.14.6 Perfect and progressive nonnite constructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

    5.15 Deverbal uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475.16 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475.17 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485.18 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

    5.18.1 Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495.18.2 Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495.18.3 Content license . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

  • Chapter 1

    Grammatical aspect

    Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how anaction, event or state, denoted by a verb, relates to theow of time.A basic aspectual distinction is that between perfectiveand imperfective aspects (not to be confused with perfectand imperfect verb forms; the meanings of the latterterms are somewhat dierent). Perfective aspect is usedin referring to an event conceived as bounded and uni-tary, without reference to any ow of time during (Ihelped him). Imperfective aspect is used for situationsconceived as existing continuously or repetitively as timeows (I was helping him"; I used to help people). Fur-ther distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguishstates and ongoing actions (continuous and progressiveaspects) from repetitive actions (habitual aspect).Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation in timebetween the event and the time of reference. This is thecase with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an eventoccurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) thetime of reference: I have eaten"; I had eaten"; I willhave eaten.Dierent languages make dierent grammatical aspec-tual distinctions; some (such as Standard German; seebelow) do not make any. The marking of aspect is of-ten conated with the marking of tense and mood (seetenseaspectmood). Aspectual distinctions may be re-stricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance lan-guages, for example, the perfectiveimperfective distinc-tion is marked in the past tense, by the division betweenimperfects and preterites. Explicit consideration of as-pect as a category rst arose out of study of the Slaviclanguages; here verbs often occur in the language in pairs,with two related verbs being used respectively for imper-fective and perfective meanings.

    1.1 Basic concept

    1.1.1 History

    The Indian linguist Yaska (ca. 7th century BCE) dealtwith grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that areprocesses (bhva), from those where the action is consid-

    ered as a completed whole (mrta). This is the key dis-tinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaskaalso applied this distinction to a verb versus an actionnominal.Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages alsoshowed an interest in aspect, but the idea did not enterinto the modern Western grammatical tradition until the19th century via the study of the grammar of the Slaviclanguages. The earliest use of the term recorded in theOxford English Dictionary dates from 1853.[1]

    1.1.2 Modern usage

    Aspect is often confused with the closely related conceptof tense, because they both convey information abouttime. While tense relates the time of referent to someother time, commonly the speech event, aspect conveysother temporal information, such as duration, comple-tion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thustense refers to temporally when while aspect refers to tem-porally how. Aspect can be said to describe the textureof the time in which a situation occurs, such as a singlepoint of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence ofdiscrete points in time, etc., whereas tense indicates itslocation 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, as they describe the presentsituation, yet each conveys dierent information or pointsof view as to how the action pertains to the present. Assuch, they dier in aspect.Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a language,distinguished through overt inection, derivational af-xes, or independent words that serve as grammaticallyrequired markers of those aspects. For example, theK'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inectionalprexes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completiveaspect;[2][3] Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le , -zhe , zi- , and -gu to mark the perfective,durative stative, durative progressive, and experientialaspects,[4] and also marks aspect with adverbs;[5] and En-glish marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be cou-pled with present participle and the perfect with the verb

    1

  • 2 CHAPTER 1. GRAMMATICAL ASPECT

    to have coupled with past participle. Even languages thatdo not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliaryverbs, however, can convey such distinctions by the useof adverbs or other syntactic constructions.[6]

    Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspector aktionsart, which is an inherent feature of verbs or verbphrases and is determined by the nature of the situationthat the verb describes.

    1.2 Common aspectual distinctionsThe most fundamental aspectual distinction, representedin many languages, is between perfective aspect and im-perfective aspect. This is the basic aspectual distinctionin the Slavic languages. It semantically corresponds tothe distinction between the morphological forms knownrespectively as the aorist and imperfect in Greek, thepreterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past (passsimple) and imperfect in French, and the perfect and im-perfect in Latin (from the Latin perfectus, meaningcompleted).Essentially, the perfective aspect looks at an event as acomplete action, while the imperfective aspect views anevent as the process of unfolding or a repeated or habitualevent (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuousaspect for events of short-term duration and to habitualaspect for longer terms). For events of short durations inthe past, the distinction often coincides with the distinc-tion in the English language between the simple past X-ed, as compared to the progressive was X-ing (com-pare I wrote the letters this morning (i.e. nished writ-ing the letters: an action completed) and I was writingletters this morning). In describing longer time periods,English needs context to maintain the distinction betweenthe habitual (I called him often in the past - a habitthat has no point of completion) and perfective (I calledhim once - an action completed), although the constructused to marks both habitual aspect and past tense andcan be used if the aspectual distinction otherwise is notclear.Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where otherlanguages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect.For example, the English verbs to know (the state ofknowing) and to nd out (knowing viewed as a com-pleted action) correspond to the imperfect and perfectof the French verb savoir and the Spanish equivalentsaber.

    1.3 Aspect vs. tenseThe Germanic languages combine the concept of aspectwith the concept of tense. Although English largely sep-arates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, pro-gressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in the past

    tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the dis-tinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is found inmost languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separationof tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly.One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms ofEnglish, between sentences such as Have you eaten yet?"and Did you eat yet?". Another is in the pluperfect (Ihad eaten), which sometimes represents the combinationof past tense and perfect (I was full because I had al-ready eaten), but sometimes simply represents a past ac-tion that is anterior to another past action (A little whileafter I had eaten, my friend arrived). (The latter situa-tion is often represented in other languages by a simpleperfective tense. Formal Spanish and French use a pastanterior tense in cases such as this.)Like tense, aspect is a way that verbs represent time.However, rather than locating an event or state in time,the way tense does, aspect describes the internal tempo-ral constituency of a situation, or in other words, aspectis a way of conceiving the ow of the process itself.[7]English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include Iwent, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the presenttense I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, Iam going to lose"; and with the future modal I will see, Iwill be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see. Whatdistinguishes these aspects within each tense is not (nec-essarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in whichit occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential,planned, etc.In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicateduniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the veryfrequently used aorist, though a functional preterite in theindicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspectin the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moodsis used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of aresultant state. E.g. - I see (present); - I saw(aorist); - I am in a state of having seen = I know(perfect).Many Sino-Tibetan languages, likeMandarin, lack gram-matical tense but are rich in aspect.

    1.4 Lexical vs. grammatical aspectMain article: Lexical aspect

    There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as de-scribed here, and lexical aspect. Lexical aspect is an in-herent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, andis not marked formally. The distinctions made as partof lexical aspect are dierent from those of grammat-ical aspect. Typical distinctions are between states (Iowned), activities (I shopped), accomplishments (Ipainted a picture), achievements (I bought), and punc-tual, or semelfactive, events (I sneezed). These distinc-tions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states

  • 1.5. INDICATING ASPECT 3

    and activities, but not usually achievements, can be usedin English with a prepositional for-phrase describing atime duration: I had a car for ve hours, I shopped forve hours, but not "*I bought a car for ve hours. Lex-ical aspect is sometimes called Aktionsart, especially byGerman and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspectis marked in Athabaskan languages.One of the factors in situation aspect is telicity. Telic-ity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, exceptthat it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation,but rather a property of an entire verb phrase. Achieve-ments, accomplishments and semelfactives have telic sit-uation aspect, while states and activities have atelic situ-ation aspect.The other factor in situation aspect is duration, whichis also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments,states, and activities have duration, while achievementsand semelfactives do not.

    1.5 Indicating aspectIn some languages, aspect and time are very clearly sepa-rated, making them much more distinct to their speakers.There are a number of languages that mark aspect muchmore saliently than time. Prominent in this category areChinese and American Sign Language, which both dif-ferentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optionaltime-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect totime. In other language groups, for example inmost mod-ern Indo-European languages (except Slavic languages),aspect has become almost entirely conated, in the verbalmorphological system, with time.In Russian, aspect is more salient than tense in narrative.Russian, like other Slavic languages, uses dierent lex-ical entries for the dierent aspects, whereas other lan-guages mark them morphologically, and still others withauxiliaries (e.g., English).In literary Arabic (, al-Fua) the verb has twoaspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammarianswhether to view the distinction as a distinction in as-pect, or tense, or both. The Past Verb ( ,'l maadiy) denotes an event (, hadath) completed inthe past, but it says nothing about the relation of this pastevent to present status. For example, "", wasala, hearrived, indicates that arrival occurred in the past with-out saying anything about the present status of the arriver- maybe he stuck around, maybe he turned around andleft, etc. - nor about the aspect of the past event ex-cept insofar as completeness can be considered aspec-tual. This Past Verb is clearly similar if not identicalto the Greek Aorist, which is considered a tense but ismore of an aspect marker. In the Arabic, aorist aspectis the logical consequence of past tense. By contrast, theVerb of Similarity ( , 'l al-mudaara'ah),

    so called because of its resemblance to the active particip-ial noun, is considered to denote an event in the presentor future without committing to a specic aspectual sensebeyond the incompleteness implied by the tense: (yadribu, he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.). Those arethe only two tenses inArabic (not counting "" amr,command, which the tradition counts as denoting futureevents.) At least thats the way the tradition sees it. To ex-plicitly mark aspect, Arabic uses a variety of lexical andsyntactic devices.Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. Onemajor change from al-Fusha is the use of a prex particle( bi in most dialects) to explicitly mark progressive,continuous, or habitual aspect: , bi-yiktib, he isnow writing, writes all the time, etc.Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospectiveaspect is a combination of tense and aspect that indicatesthe action is in preparation to take place. The inceptiveaspect identies the beginning stage of an action (e.g.Esperanto uses ek-, e.g. Mi ekmanas, I am beginningto eat.) and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify achange of state (The owers started blooming) or the startof an action (He started running). Aspects of stage con-tinue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive,and terminative.Important qualications:

    Although the perfective is often thought of as rep-resenting a momentary action, this is not strictlycorrect. It can equally well be used for an actionthat took time, as long as it is conceived of as a unit,with a clearly dened start and end, such as Lastsummer I visited France.

    Grammatical aspect represents a formal distinctionencoded in the grammar of a language. Althoughlanguages that are described as having imperfectiveand perfective aspects agree in most cases in theiruse of these aspects, they may not agree in everysituation. For example:

    Some languages have additional grammaticalaspects. Spanish and Ancient Greek, for ex-ample, have a perfect (not the same as the per-fective), which refers to a state resulting froma previous action (also described as a previousaction with relevance to a particular time, or aprevious action viewed from the perspective ofa later time). This corresponds (roughly) to thehave X-ed construction in English, as in Ihave recently eaten. Languages that lack thisaspect (such as Portuguese, which is closelyrelated to Spanish) often use the past perfec-tive to render the present perfect (compare theroughly synonymous English sentences Haveyou eaten yet?" and Did you eat yet?").

    In some languages, the formal representationof aspect is optional, and can be omitted when

  • 4 CHAPTER 1. GRAMMATICAL ASPECT

    the aspect is clear from context or does notneed to be emphasized. This is the case, forexample, in Mandarin Chinese, with the per-fective sux le and (especially) the imperfec-tive zhe.

    For some verbs in some languages, the dier-ence between perfective and imperfective con-veys an additional meaning dierence; in suchcases, the two aspects are typically translatedusing separate verbs in English. In Greek,for example, the imperfective sometimes addsthe notion of try to do something (the so-called conative imperfect); hence, the sameverb, in the imperfective (present or imper-fect) and aorist, respectively, is used to con-vey look and see, search and nd, listen andhear. (For example, (kouomen,we listened) vs. (kousamen,we heard).) Spanish has similar pairs forcertain verbs, such as (imperfect and preterite,respectively) saba (I knew) vs. supe (Ifound out), poda (I was able to) vs. pude(I succeeded (in doing something)"), quera(I wanted to) vs. quise (I tried to), and noquera (I did not want to) vs. no quise (Irefused (to do something)"). Such dierencesare often highly language-specic.

    1.6 Aspect by language

    1.6.1 EnglishThe English tenseaspect system has two morphologi-cally distinct tenses, present and past. No marker of afuture tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity ofan eventmay be expressed through the use of the auxiliaryverbs "will" and "shall", by a present form plus an adverb,as in tomorrow we go to New York City, or by someothermeans. Past is distinguished from presentfuture, incontrast, with internal modications of the verb. Thesetwo tenses may be modied further for progressive as-pect (also called continuous aspect), for the perfect, orfor both. These two aspectual forms are also referred toas BE +ING[8] and HAVE +EN,[9] respectively, whichavoids what may be unfamiliar terminology.Aspects of the present tense:

    Present simple (not progressive, not perfect): I eat Present progressive (progressive, not perfect): I ameating

    Present perfect (not progressive, perfect): I haveeaten

    Present perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): Ihave been eating

    (While many elementary discussions of English grammarclassify the present perfect as a past tense, it relates the ac-tion to the present time. One cannot say of someone nowdeceased that he has eaten or has been eating. Thepresent auxiliary implies that he is in some way present(alive), even if the action denoted is completed (perfect)or partially completed (progressive perfect).)Aspects of the past tense:

    Past simple (not progressive, not perfect): I ate Past progressive (progressive, not perfect): I waseating

    Past perfect (not progressive, perfect): I had eaten Past perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): Ihad been eating

    Aspects can also be marked on non-nite forms of theverb: "(to) be eating (innitive with progressive aspect),"(to) have eaten (innitive with perfect aspect), havingeaten (present participle or gerund with perfect aspect),etc. The perfect innitive can further be governed bymodal verbs to express various meanings, mostly combin-ing modality with past reference: I should have eatenetc. In particular, the modals will and shall and their sub-junctive forms would and should are used to combine fu-ture or hypothetical reference with aspectual meaning:

    Simple future, simple conditional: I will eat, Iwould eat

    Future progressive, conditional progressive: I willbe eating, I would be eating

    Future perfect, conditional perfect: I will haveeaten, I would have eaten

    Future perfect progressive, conditional perfect pro-gressive: I will have been eating, I would havebeen eating

    The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quitecomplex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:

    I was walking down the road when I metMichael Jacksons lawyer. (Speaker viewpointin middle of action)I have traveled widely, but I have never been toMoscow. (Speaker viewpoint at end of action)

    But they can have other illocutionary forces or additionalmodal components:

    You are being stupid now. (You are doing itdeliberately)

  • 1.6. ASPECT BY LANGUAGE 5

    You are not having chocolate with yoursausages! (I forbid it)I am having lunch with Mike tomorrow. (It isdecided)

    For further discussion of the uses of the various tenseaspect combinations, see Uses of English verb forms.English expresses some other aspectual distinctions withother constructions. Used to + VERB is a past habitual, asin I used to go to school, and going to / gonna + VERBis a prospective, a future situation highlighting current in-tention or expectation, as in I'm going to go to schoolnext year.Note that the aspectual systems of certain dialects of En-glish, such as African-American Vernacular English (seefor example habitual be), and of creoles based on Englishvocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English, are quitedierent from those of standard English, and often dis-tinguish aspect at the expense of tense.

    1.6.2 German vernacular and colloquial

    Although Standard German does not have aspects, manyUpper German languages, all West Central German lan-guages, and some more vernacular German languagesdo make one aspectual distinction, and so do the collo-quial languages of many regions, the so-called Germanregiolects. While ocially discouraged in schools andseen as 'bad language', local English teachers like thedistinction, because it corresponds well with the Englishcontinuous form. It is formed by the conjugated auxil-iary verb sein (to be) followed by the preposition amand the innitive, or the nominalized verb. The latter twoare phonetically indistinguishable; in writing, capitaliza-tion diers: Ich war am essen vs. Ich war am Essen(I was eating, compared to the Standard German approx-imation: Ich war beim Essen); yet these forms are notstandardized and thus are relatively infrequently writtendown or printed, even in quotations or direct speech. Ifwritten, the rst form (the innitive) is preferred.In the Tyrolean and other Bavarian regiolect the prex*da can be found, which form perfective aspects. I husgleant (Ich habe es gelernt = I learnt it) vs. I husdaleant (*Ich habe es DAlernt = I succeeded in learn-ing).

    1.6.3 Slavic languages

    Main article: Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages

    The Slavic languages make a clear distinction betweenperfective and imperfective aspects; it was in relation tothese languages that the modern concept of aspect origi-nally developed.

    In Slavic languages, a given verb is, in itself, either per-fective or imperfective. Consequently each language con-tains many pairs of verbs, corresponding to each other inmeaning, except that one expresses perfective aspect andthe other imperfective. (This may be considered a formof lexical aspect.) Perfective verbs are commonly formedfrom imperfective ones by the addition of a prex, or elsethe imperfective verb is formed from the perfective oneby modication of the stem or ending. Suppletion alsoplays a small role. Perfective verbs cannot generally beused with the meaning of a present tense their present-tense forms in fact have future reference. An example ofsuch a pair of verbs, from Polish, is given below:

    Innitive (and dictionary form): pisa (to write,imperfective); napisa (to write, perfective)

    Present/simple future tense: pisze (writes); napisze(will write, perfective)

    Compound future tense (imperfective only): bdziepisa (will write, will be writing)

    Past tense: pisa (was writing, used to write,wrote, imperfective); napisa (wrote, perfective)

    In at least the East Slavic andWest Slavic languages, thereis a three-way aspect dierentiation for verbs of motion,with two forms of imperfective, determinate and inde-terminate, and one form of perfective. The two forms ofimperfective can be used in all three tenses (past, present,and future), but the perfective can only be used with pastand future. The indeterminate imperfective expresseshabitual aspect (or motion in no single direction), whilethe determinate imperfective expresses progressive as-pect. The dierence corresponds closely to that betweenthe English I (regularly) go to school and I am goingto school (now)". The three-way dierence is given be-low for the Russian basic (unprexed) verbs of motion.When prexes are attached to Russian verbs of motion,they become more or less normal imperfective/perfectivepairs, although the prexes are generally attached to theindeterminate imperfective to form the prexed imper-fective and to the determinate imperfective to form theprexed perfective. For example, prex - + indeter-minate = ; and prex - + determi-nate = (to arrive (on foot)).

    1.6.4 Romance languagesModern Romance languages merge the concepts of as-pect and tense but consistently distinguish perfective andimperfective aspects in the past tense. This derives di-rectly from the way the Latin language used to renderboth aspects and consecutio temporum.Italian language example using the verb mangiare (toeat):Mood: indicativo (indicative)

  • 6 CHAPTER 1. GRAMMATICAL ASPECT

    Presente (present): io mangio (I eat, I'm eating) -merges habitual and continuous aspects, among oth-ers

    Passato prossimo (recent past): io ho mangiato (Iate, I have eaten) - merges perfective and perfect

    Imperfetto (imperfect): io mangiavo (I was eating,or I usually ate) - merges habitual and progressiveaspects

    Trapassato prossimo (recent pluperfect): io avevomangiato (I had eaten) - tense, not ordinarilymarked for aspect

    Passato remoto (far past): io mangiai (I ate) - per-fective aspect

    Trapassato remoto (far pluperfect): io ebbi mangiato(I had eaten) - tense

    Futuro semplice (simple future): io manger (I shalleat) - tense

    Futuro anteriore (future perfect): io avr mangiato(I shall have eaten) - future tense and perfecttense/aspect

    The imperfetto/trapassato prossimo contrasts with thepassato remoto/trapassato remoto in that imperfetto ren-ders an imperfective (continuous) past while passato re-moto expresses an aorist (punctual/historical) past.Other aspects in Italian are rendered with other pe-riphrases, like prospective (io sto per mangiare I'm aboutto eat, io star per mangiare I shall be about to eat), orcontinuous/progressive (io sto mangiando I'm eating, iostar mangiando I shall be eating).

    1.6.5 Finnic languagesFinnish and Estonian, among others, have a grammat-ical aspect contrast of telicity between telic and atelic.Telic sentences signal that the intended goal of an actionis achieved. Atelic sentences do not signal whether anysuch goal has been achieved. The aspect is indicated bythe case of the object: accusative is telic and partitive isatelic. For example, the (implicit) purpose of shooting isto kill, such that:

    Ammuin karhun -- I shot the bear (succeeded; it isdone)" i.e., I shot the bear dead.

    Ammuin karhua -- I shot at the bear i.e. the bearmay have survived.

    In rare cases corresponding telic and atelic forms can beunrelated by meaning.Derivational suxes exist for various aspects. Examples:

    -ahta- (once), as in huudahtaa (to yell once)(used for emotive verbs like laugh, smile,growl, bark"; is not used for verbs like shoot,say, drink)

    -ele- repeatedly as in ammuskella to go shootingaround

    There are derivational suxes for verbs, which carryfrequentative, momentane, causative, and inchoative as-pect meanings. Also, pairs of verbs diering only intransitivity exist.

    1.6.6 Austronesian languages

    Hawaiian

    The Hawaiian language conveys aspect asfollows:[10][11][12]

    The unmarked verb, frequently used, canindicate habitual aspect or perfective as-pect in the past.

    ke + verb + nei is frequently used and con-veys the progressive aspect in the present.

    e + verb + ana conveys the progressiveaspect in any tense.

    ua + verb conveys the perfective aspectbut is frequently omitted.

    Indonesian

    Main article: Indonesian grammar

    Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of theIndonesian language follow a system of axes to expresschanges in meaning. To express the aspects, Indonesianuses a number of auxiliary verbs:

    Sudah: perfective Baru: near perfective Belum: imperfective Sedang: progressive not implicating anend

    Masih: progressive implicating an end Pernah: semelfactive

  • 1.7. TERMS FOR VARIOUS ASPECTS 7

    Philippine languages

    Main article: Tagalog grammar Conjugation Chart

    Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of thePhilippine languages follow a complex system of axesto express subtle changes in meaning. However, theverbs in this family of languages are conjugated to ex-press the aspects and not the tenses. Though many of thePhilippine languages do not have a fully codied gram-mar, most of them follow the verb aspects that are demon-strated by Filipino or Tagalog.

    1.6.7 Creole languagesCreole languages[13] typically use the unmarked verb fortimeless habitual aspect, or for stative aspect, or for per-fective aspect in the past. Invariant pre-verbal markersare often used. Non-stative verbs typically can optionallybe marked for the progressive, habitual, completive, orirrealis aspect. The progressive in English-based AtlanticCreoles often uses de (from English be). Jamaican Cre-ole uses pan (from English upon) for the present pro-gressive and wa (from English was) for the past pro-gressive. Haitian Creole uses the progressive marker ap.Some Atlantic Creoles use one marker for both the ha-bitual and progressive aspects. In Tok Pisin, the optionalprogressive marker follows the verb. Completive markerstend to come from superstrate words like done or n-ish, and some creoles model the future/irrealis markeron the superstrate word for go.

    1.6.8 American Sign LanguageAmerican Sign Language (ASL) is similar to many othersign languages in that it has no grammatical tense butmany verbal aspects produced bymodifying the base verbsign.An example is illustrated with the verb TELL. The basicform of this sign is produced with the initial posture of theindex nger on the chin, followed by a movement of thehand and nger tip toward the indirect object (the recipi-ent of the telling). Inected into the unrealized inceptiveaspect (to be just about to tell), the sign begins with thehand moving from in front of the trunk in an arc to theinitial posture of the base sign (i.e., index nger touch-ing the chin) while inhaling through the mouth, droppingthe jaw, and directing eye gaze toward the verbs object.The posture is then held rather than moved toward the in-direct object. During the hold, the signer also stops thebreath by closing the glottis. Other verbs (such as lookat, wash the dishes, yell, irt) are inected into theunrealized inceptive aspect similarly: The hands used inthe base sign move in an arc from in front of the trunkto the initial posture of the underlying verb sign while in-haling, dropping the jaw, and directing eye gaze toward

    the verbs object (if any), but subsequent movements andpostures are dropped as the posture and breath are held.Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, in-choative (to begin to...), predisposional (to tend to...),susceptative (to... easily), frequentative (to... often),protractive (to... continuously), incessant (to... inces-santly), durative (to... for a long time), iterative (to...over and over again), intensive (to... very much), re-sultative (to... completely), approximative (to... some-what), semblitive (to appear to...), increasing (to...more and more). Some aspects combine with others tocreate yet ner distinctions.Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derivedfor aspect lose their grammatical transitivity. They re-main semantically transitive, typically assuming an objectmade prominent using a topic marker or mentioned in aprevious sentence. See Syntax in ASL for details.

    1.7 Terms for various aspectsThe following aspectual terms are found in the literature.Approximate English equivalents are given.

    Perfective: 'I struck the bell' (an event viewed in itsentirety, without reference to its temporal structureduring its occurrence)

    Momentane: 'The mouse squeaked once' (con-trasted to 'The mouse squeaked / was squeaking')

    Perfect (a common conation of aspect and tense):'I have arrived' (brings attention to the consequencesof a situation in the past)

    Recent perfect, also known as after perfect:'I just ate' or 'I am after eating' (Hiberno-English)

    Prospective (a conation of aspect and tense): 'Heis about to fall', 'I am going to cry (brings attentionto the anticipation of an imminent future situation)

    Imperfective (an activity with ongoing nature: com-bines the meanings of both the progressive and thehabitual aspects): 'I was walking to work' (progres-sive) or 'I walked (used to walk, would walk) to workevery day' (habitual).

    Continuous: 'I am eating' or 'I know' (situation isdescribed as ongoing and either evolving or unevolv-ing; a subtype of imperfective)

    Progressive: 'I am eating' (action is described as on-going and evolving; a subtype of continuous)

    Stative: 'I know French' (situation is described asongoing but not evolving; a subtype of continuous)

  • 8 CHAPTER 1. GRAMMATICAL ASPECT

    Habitual: 'I used to walk home from work', 'I wouldwalk home from work every day', 'I walk home fromwork every day' (a subtype of imperfective)

    Gnomic/generic: 'Fish swim and birds y' (generaltruths)

    Episodic: 'The bird ew' (non-gnomic) Continuative aspect: 'I am still eating' Inceptive or ingressive: 'I started to run' (beginningof a new action: dynamic)

    Inchoative: 'The owers started to bloom' (begin-ning of a new state: static)

    Terminative ~ cessative: 'I nished eating/reading' Defective: 'I almost fell' Pausative: 'I stopped working for a while' Resumptive: 'I resumed sleeping' Punctual: 'I slept' Durative: 'I slept for a while' Delimitative: 'I slept for an hour' Protractive: 'The argument went on and on' Iterative: 'I read the same books again and again' Frequentative: 'It sparkled', contrasted with 'Itsparked'. Or, 'I run around', vs. 'I run'

    Experiential: 'I have gone to school many times (seefor example Chinese aspects)

    Intentional: 'I listened carefully' Accidental: 'I accidentally knocked over the chair' Intensive: 'It glared' Moderative: 'It shone' Attenuative: 'It glimmered' Segmentative: 'It is coming out in successivemultitudes[14]

    1.8 See also Aktionsart Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moodsand tenses

    Grammatical conjugation Grammatical tense Grammatical mood Nominal TAM (tenseaspectmood) Tenseaspectmood

    1.9 Notes

    [1] Robert I. Binnick (1991). Time and the verb: a guide totense and aspect. Oxford University Press US. pp. 1356.ISBN 978-0-19-506206-9. Retrieved 12 August 2011.

    [2] Pye, Clifton (2008). Stacey Stowers, Nathan Poell,ed. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics (University ofKansas title=MayanMorphosyntax) 26. Missing or empty|title= (help)

    [3] Pye, Clifton (2001). The Acquisition of Finiteness inK'iche' Maya. BUCLD 25: Proceedings of the 25th an-nual Boston University Conference on Language Develop-ment, pp. 645-656. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

    [4] Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson (1981). Aspect.Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar.Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 184-237.

    [5] Zhang, Yaxu; Zhang, Jingting (2 July 2008). Brainresponses to agreement violations of Chinese gram-matical aspect. NeuroReport 19 (10): 103943.doi:10.1097/WNR.0b013e328302f14f. PMID18580575. |rst2= missing |last2= in Editors list(help)

    [6] Gabriele, Alison (2008). Transfer and Transition in theL2 Acquisition of Aspect. Studies in Second LanguageAcquisition: 6.

    [7] Bernard Comrie, 1976. Aspect. Cambridge UniversityPress

    [8] See, for example, Gabriele, Allison; McClure, William(2003). Why swimming is just as dicult as dying forJapanese learners of English (PDF). ZAS Papers in Lin-guistics 29: 1.

    [9] See, for example, Partee, Barbara H (1973). SomeStructural Analogies between Tenses and Pronouns in En-glish. Journal of Philosophy (Journal of Philosophy, Inc.)70 (18): 601. doi:10.2307/2025024. JSTOR 2025024.

    [10] sten Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems, Blackwell, 1985:ch. 6.

    [11] Schtz, Albert J., All about Hawaiian, Univ. of HawaiiPress, 1995: pp. 23-25.

    [12] Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Elbert, Samuel H., New PocketHawaiian Dictionary, Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1992: pp.228-231.

    [13] Holm, John, An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 2000: pp. 173-189.

    [14] Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1936). The punctual and seg-mentative aspects of verbs in Hopi. Language 12 (2):127131. doi:10.2307/408755. JSTOR 408755.

  • 1.11. EXTERNAL LINKS 9

    1.10 Other references Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguis-tics (ISBN 0-415-20319-8), by Hadumod Buss-mann, edited by Gregory P. Trauth and Kerstin Kaz-zazi, Routledge, London 1996. Translation of Ger-man Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft Krner Verlag,Stuttgart 1990.

    Morfofonologian harjoituksia, Lauri Carlson

    Bache, C. (1982). Aspect and Aktionsart: To-wards a semantic distinction. Journal of Linguistics,18(01), 57-72.

    Berdinetto, P. M., & Deltto, D. (2000). Aspectvs. Actionality: Some reasons for keeping themapart. In O. Dahl (Ed.), Tense and Aspect in theLanguages of Europe (pp. 189226). Berlin: Mou-ton de Gruyter.

    Binnick, R. I. (1991). Time and the verb: A guideto tense and aspect. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

    Binnick, R. I. (2006). Aspect and Aspectuality.In B. Aarts & A. M. S. McMahon (Eds.), TheHandbook of English Linguistics (pp. 244268).Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

    Chertkova, M. Y. (2004). Vid or Aspect? Onthe Typology of a Slavic and Romance Category[Using Russian and Spanish Material]. VestnikMoskovskogo Universiteta, Filologiya, 58(9-1), 97-122.

    Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to thestudy of verbal aspect and related problems. Cam-bridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Frawley, W. (1992). Linguistic semantics. Hills-dale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Kortmann, B. (1991). The Triad TenseAspectAktionsart. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 6, 9-30.

    MacDonald, J. E. (2008). The syntactic nature ofinner aspect: A minimalist perspective. Amster-dam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.

    Maslov, I. S. (1998). Vid glagol'nyj [Aspect ofthe verb]. In V. N. Yartseva (Ed.), Jazykoznanie:Bolshoj entsyklopedicheskij slovar' (pp. 8384).Moscow: Bolshaja Rossijskaja Entsyklopedija.

    Richardson, K. (2007). Case and aspect in Slavic.Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

    Sasse, H.-J. (2002). Recent activity in the theoryof aspect: Accomplishments, achievements, or justnon-progressive state? Linguistic Typology, 6(2),199-271.

    Sasse, H.-J. (2006). Aspect and Aktionsart. In E.K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and lin-guistics (Vol. 1, pp. 535538). Boston: Elsevier.

    Smith, C. S. (1991). The parameter of aspect. Dor-drecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Tatevosov, S. (2002). The parameter of actionality.Linguistic Typology, 6(3), 317-401.

    Travis, L. (in preparation). Inner aspect. Verkuyl, H. (2005). How (in-)sensitive is tenseto aspectual information? In B. Hollebrandse, A.van Hout & C. Vet (Eds.), Crosslinguistic views ontense, aspect and modality (pp. 145169). Amster-dam: Rodopi.

    Zalizniak, A. A., & Shmelev, A. D. (2000). Vve-denie v russkuiu aspektologiiu [Introduction to Rus-sian aspectology]. Moskva: IAzyki russkoi kultury.

    1.11 External links TAMPA: Aspect Explained Robert Binnick annotated tense/aspect bibliography(around 9000 entries)

    Anna Katarzyna Mynarczyk: Aspectual Pairing inPolish, a pdf version of the book

    Grammar Tutorials - a column overview of the En-glish tenses

    Greek tenses Verb Aspect

  • Chapter 2

    Grammatical mood

    In linguistics, grammatical mood (also mode) is agrammatical (usually morphologically marked) feature ofverbs, used for signaling modality.[1][2]:p.181;[3] That is, itis the use of verbal inectionsknown as grammaticalconjugationthat allow speakers to express their attitudetoward what they are saying (e.g. a statement of fact, ofdesire, of command, etc.). Less commonly, the term isused more broadly to allow for the syntactic expression ofmodality that is, the use of non-inectional phrases.Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammaticalaspect, although the same word patterns are used for ex-pressing more than one of these meanings at the sametime in many languages, including English andmost othermodern Indo-European languages. (See tenseaspectmood for a discussion of this.)Some examples of moods are indicative, interrogatory,imperative, emphatic, subjunctive, injunctive, optative,potential. Innitive is a category apart from all these niteforms, and so are gerunds and participles. Some UralicSamoyedic languages have more than ten moods; Nenetshas as many as sixteen. The original Indo-European in-ventory of moods consisted of indicative, subjunctive,optative, and imperative. Not every Indo-European lan-guage has each of these moods, but the most conserva-tive ones such as Avestan, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrithave them all. English has the indicative, imperative, em-phatic, and subjunctive moods; others, such as the condi-tional, do not appear as morphologically distinct forms.Not all of the moods listed below are clearly conceptu-ally distinct. Individual terminology varies from languageto language, and the coverage of (e.g.) the conditionalmood in one language may largely overlap with that ofthe hypothetical or potential mood in another. Evenwhen two dierent moods exist in the same language,their respective usages may blur, or may be dened bysyntactic rather than semantic criteria. For example, thesubjunctive and optative moods in Ancient Greek alter-nate syntactically in many subordinate clauses, depend-ing on the tense of the main verb. The usage of theindicative, subjunctive, and jussive moods in ClassicalArabic is almost completely controlled by syntactic con-text. The only possible alternation in the same contextis between indicative and jussive following the negativeparticle l.

    2.1 Realis moodsMain article: Realis mood

    Realis moods are a category of grammatical moods thatindicate that something is actually the case or actually notthe case. The most common realis mood is the indicativemood. Some languages have a distinct generic mood forexpressing general truths. For other realis moods, see themain Realis mood article.

    2.1.1 Indicative

    The indicative mood, or evidential mood, is used for fac-tual statements and positive beliefs. All intentions that aparticular language does not categorize as another moodare classied as indicative. In English, questions are con-sidered interrogatory. The indicative mood is the mostcommonly used mood and is found in all languages. Ex-ample: Paul is eating an apple or John eats apples.

    2.2 Irrealis moodsMain article: Irrealis mood

    Irrealis moods are the set of grammatical moods that in-dicate that something is not actually the case or a certainsituation or action is not known to have happened. Sim-ply put, they are any verb or sentence mood that are notrealis moods. They may be part of expressions of neces-sity, possibility, requirement, wish or desire, fear, or aspart of counterfactual reasonings, etc.Irrealis verb forms are used when speaking of an eventwhich has not happened, is not likely to happen, or is oth-erwise far removed from the real course of events. Forexample, in the sentence If you had done your home-work, you wouldn't have failed the class, had done is anirrealis verb form.Some languages have distinct grammatical forms that in-dicate that the event described by a specic verb is an irre-alis verb. Many of the Indo-European languages preserve

    10

  • 2.2. IRREALIS MOODS 11

    a subjunctive mood that functions as an irrealis. Somealso preserve an optative mood that describes events thatare wished for or hoped for but not factual.Common irrealis moods are the imperative, the condi-tional, the subjunctive, the optative, the jussive, and thepotential. For other examples, see the main article.

    2.2.1 Subjunctive

    Main article: Subjunctive mood

    The subjunctive mood, sometimes called conjunctivemood, has several uses in dependent clauses. Examplesinclude discussing imaginary or hypothetical events andsituations, expressing opinions or emotions, or makingpolite requests (the exact scope is language-specic). Asubjunctive mood exists in English, though it is used inEnglish much less than in many other Indo-European lan-guages. In English, this mood has, for some uses, becomesomething of a linguistic fossil. An example of the sub-junctive mood is I suggest that Paul eat an apple. In thisinstance, Paul is not in fact eating an apple. The sentencemerely presents the hypothetical (but unfullled) actionsof Paul according to the speakers suggestion. Contrastthis with the indicative verb of the sentence Paul eats anapple, in which the verb to eat is in the present tenseand employs a mood that states an unambiguous fact. An-other way of expressing the request is I suggest that Paulshould eat an apple, derived from Paul should eat anapple.Other uses of the subjunctive in English are archaisms,as in And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then heshall bring for his trespass... (KJV Leviticus 5:7). State-ments such as I will ensure that he leave immediatelyoften sound archaic or overly formal, and have been al-most completely supplanted by constructions with the in-dicative, like I will ensure that he leaves immediately.The subjunctive part of the conditional version of Johneats if he is hungry is:

    English: John would eat if he were hungry.German: Johannes e, wenn er Hunger htte.Spanish: Juan comera si tuviera hambre.Italian: Giovanni mangerebbe se avesse fame.French: Jean mangerait sil avait faim.Old English (Anglo-Saxon): Ic lyste s oneIohannes cwierre.

    The above examples may not, according to the rules oftheir language, have been grammatically correct- as suchthey have been changed accordingly.The subjunctive mood gures prominently in thegrammar of the Romance languages, which require this

    mood for certain types of dependent clauses. This pointcommonly causes diculty for English speakers learningthese languages.In certain other languages, the dubitative or the condi-tional moods may be employed instead of the subjunctivein referring to doubtful or unlikely events (see the mainarticle).

    2.2.2 Conditional

    Main article: Conditional mood

    The conditional mood is used for speaking of an eventwhose realization is dependent upon another condition,particularly, but not exclusively, in conditional sentences.In Modern English, this type of modality is expressed viaa periphrastic construction, with the form would + inni-tive, (e.g. I would buy), and thus is a mood only in thebroad sense and not in the more common narrow sense ofthe term mood. In other languages, such as Spanish orFrench, verbs have a specic conditional inection. Thisapplies also to some verbs in German, in which the con-ditional mood is conventionally called Konjuntiv II, dif-fering from Konjunktiv I. Thus, the conditional version ofJohn eats if he is hungry is:

    English: John would eat if he were hungry.German: Johannes e, wenn er hungrig wre.French: Jean mangerait sil avait faim.Spanish: Juan comera si tuviera hambre.Portuguese: Joo comeria se estivesse comfome.Polish: Jan zjadby, gdyby by godny.Italian: Giovanni mangerebbe se avesse fame.Finnish: Juha sisi jos hnell olisi nlk.

    Johannes wrde essen, wenn er hungrig wre is also ac-ceptable in German.In the Romance languages, the conditional form is usedprimarily in the apodosis (main clause) of conditionalclauses, and in a few set phrases where it expresses cour-tesy or doubt. The main verb in the protasis (dependentclause) is usually in the subjunctive or in the indicativemood. However, this is not a universal trait: among oth-ers in German (as above), Finnish and Romanian (eventhough the last is a Romance language), the conditionalmood is used in both the apodosis and the protasis. Afurther example is the sentence I would buy a house ifI earned a lot of money, where in Finnish both clauseshave the conditional marker -isi-: Ostaisin talon, jos an-saitsisin paljon rahaa. In Polish (as well as in easternSlavic languages) the conditional marker -by also appearstwice: Kupibym dom, gdybym zarabia duo pienidzy.

  • 12 CHAPTER 2. GRAMMATICAL MOOD

    Because English is used as a lingua franca, a similar kindof doubling of the word would is a fairly common wayto misuse an English language construction: *I wouldbuy if I would earn.... As in this wrong case, in English,the would + innitive construct can be employed in mainclauses, with a subjunctive sense: If you would only tellme what is troubling you, I might be able to help.

    2.2.3 OptativeMain article: Optative mood

    The optative mood expresses hopes, wishes or commandsand has other uses that may overlap with the subjunc-tive mood. Few languages have an optative as a dis-tinct mood; some that do are Albanian, Ancient Greek,Kazakh, Japanese, Finnish, Nepali, and Sanskrit.

    2.2.4 ImperativeMain article: Imperative mood

    The imperative mood expresses direct commands, prohi-bitions, and requests. In many circumstances, using theimperative mood may sound blunt or even rude, so it isoften used with care. Example: Paul, do your home-work now. An imperative is used for telling someone todo something without argument.Many languages, including English, use the bare verbstem to form the imperative (such as go, run, do).Other languages, such as Seri and Latin, however, usespecial imperative forms.In English, the second person is implied by the imperativeexcept when rst-person plural is specied, as in Letsgo (Let us go).In Romance languages a rst person plural exists in theimperative mood: Spanish: Vamos a la playa; French:Allons la plage (both meaning: Let us go to the beach).The prohibitive mood, the negative imperative may begrammatically or morphologically dierent from the im-perative mood in some languages. It indicates that theaction of the verb is not permitted, e.g. Don't you go!"In English, the imperative is sometimes used for forminga conditional sentence: e.g. go eastwards a mile, andyou'll see it means if you go eastwards a mile, you willsee it.

    2.2.5 JussiveMain article: Jussive mood

    The jussive mood expresses pleading, insistence, im-ploring, self-encouragement, wishing, desiring, intention,

    commanding, purpose, or consequence. It is found inArabic, where it is called the , mazm. The rulesgoverning the jussive in Arabic are somewhat complex.

    2.2.6 PotentialThe potential mood is a mood of probability indicatingthat, in the opinion of the speaker, the action or occur-rence is considered likely. It is used in Finnish, Japanese,in Sanskrit, and in the Sami languages. (In Japanese it isoften called something like tentative, since potential isused for referring to a voice indicating capability to per-form the action.)In Finnish, it is mostly a literary device, as it has virtuallydisappeared from daily spoken language in most dialects.Its ax is -ne-, as in *men + ne + e mennee "(s/he/it)will probably go. In English, it is formed by means ofthe auxiliaries may, can, ought, and must: She may go.".

    2.2.7 InferentialMain article: Inferential mood

    2.3 Other moods

    2.3.1 InterrogativeMain article: Interrogative mood

    The interrogative (or interrogatory) mood is used for ask-ing questions. Most languages do not have a special moodfor asking questions, but exceptions include Welsh andNenets.

    2.3.2 DeityThe Deity mode of speech refers to the use of the verb'to be' to assert universal truths which are actually sub-jective observations. It allows even the most ignorantto transform their opinions magically into god-like pro-nouncements on the nature of things.[4] This and otherperceived widespread misuses of the verb 'to be' moti-vated the elimination of 'to be' in the E-Prime version ofEnglish.

    2.4 See also Articles on specic grammatical moods Grammatical conjugation Grammatical modality

  • 2.6. EXTERNAL LINKS 13

    Polarity item Nominal TAM

    2.5 References[1] Palmer, F. R., Mood and Modality, Cambridge Univ.

    Press, 1986 (second edition 2001).

    [2] Bybee, Joan; Perkins, Revere; and Pagliuca, William. TheEvolution of Grammar, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994.

    [3] Loos, Eugine Erals; Anderson, Susan; Day, Dwight H.,Jr.; Jordan, Paul C.; Wingate, J. Douglas, eds. (2004),What is mood and modality?, SIL International, retrieved2014-02-06

    [4] Kellogg, E.W.; Bourland Jr., D. David. Working with E-Prime: Some Practical Notes (PDF). Et cetera. JSTOR42577258. Retrieved 2015-04-06.

    2.6 External links Mood and Modality: Out of theory and into the fray Mood in Biblical Greek

    From SIL International:

    Deontic modality Volitive modality: imprecative mood, optativemood

    Directive modality: deliberative mood,imperative mood, immediate imperativemood, jussive mood, obligative mood,permissive mood, precative mood, prohibitivemood

    Epistemic modality judgment modality: assumptive mood,declarative mood, deductive mood, dubitativemood, hypothetical mood, interrogativemood, speculative mood

    Irrealis modality: subjunctive mood

  • Chapter 3

    Pluperfect

    Past perfect redirects here. For other uses, see Pastperfect (disambiguation).

    The pluperfect is a type of verb form, traditionallytreated as one of the tenses of certain languages, usedin referring to something that occurred earlier than thetime being considered, when the time being consideredis already in the past. The meaning of the pluperfect isequivalent to that of English verb forms such as "(we) hadarrived or "(they) had written.The word derives from the Latin plus quam perfectum,more than perfect the Latin perfect refers to some-thing that occurred in the past, while the pluperfect refersto something that occurred more (further) in the pastthan the perfect.In English grammar, the equivalent of the pluperfect (aform such as had written) is now often called the pastperfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect.(The same term is sometimes used in relation to the gram-mar of other languages.) English also has a past perfectprogressive (or past perfect continuous) form: had beenwriting.

    3.1 Meaning of the pluperfectThe pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense; inmodern linguistic terminology it may be said to combinetense with grammatical aspect; namely past tense (refer-ence to past time) and perfect aspect (state of being com-pleted). It is used to refer to an occurrence that was al-ready in the past (completed) at a past time.Bernard Comrie classies the pluperfect as an absolute-relative tense, because it absolutely (not by context) es-tablishes a deixis (the past event) and places the actionrelative to the deixis (before it).[1]

    Examples of the English pluperfect (past perfect) arefound in the following sentence (from Viktor Frankl'sMans Search for Meaning):

    A man who for years had thought he had reachedthe absolute limit of all possible suering now found

    that suering had no limits, and that he could suerstill more, and more intensely.

    Here, had thought and had reached are examples ofthe pluperfect. They refer to an event (a man thinkinghe has reached the limit of his capacity to suer), whichtakes place before another event (the man nding that hiscapacity to suer has no limit), that is itself a past event,referred to using the past tense (found). The pluperfect isneeded to make it clear that the rst event (the thinkingand the supposed reaching) is placed even earlier in thepast.

    3.2 Examples from various lan-guages

    Some languages, like Latin, make pluperfects purely byinecting the verb, whereas most modern European lan-guages do so using appropriate auxiliary verbs in com-bination with past participles. The ways in which somelanguages form the pluperfect are described below.

    3.2.1 Greek and LatinAncient Greek verbs had a pluperfect form (called, more than completed). An exam-ple is , had sacriced compare the per-fect , has sacriced. See Ancient Greek verbs.Modern Greek uses auxiliaries to form the pluperfect; ex-amples are given in the table at the end of this article.In Latin, the pluperfect (plus quam perfectum) is formedwithout an auxiliary verb in the active voice, and with anauxiliary verb plus the perfect passive participle in thepassive voice. For example, in the indicative mood:

    Pecuniam mercatori dederat. (He had givenmoney to the merchant"; active)

    Pecunia mercatori data erat. (Money had beengiven to the merchant"; passive)

    The subjunctive mood is formed similarly (in this casededisset and data esset respectively). In many cases an

    14

  • 3.2. EXAMPLES FROM VARIOUS LANGUAGES 15

    ablative absolute phrase, consisting of a noun and perfectparticiple in the ablative case, may be used in place ofa pluperfect; for example: Pecunia mercatori data, ces-sit emptor, When money had been given (more literally:Money having been given) to the merchant, the buyerleft.For detailed information see Latin grammar and Latinconjugation.

    3.2.2 EnglishIn English grammar, the pluperfect is formed by com-bining the auxiliary verb had with the past participle ofthe main verb, as in had jumped or had written. It iscommonly called the past perfect, being a combinationof perfect aspect (marked by the use of the have auxil-iary with the past participle) and past tense (marked bythe use of the past tense of that auxiliary, had). It isone of a number of analogously formed perfect construc-tions, such as the present perfect (have/has jumped),future perfect (will have jumped) and conditional per-fect (would have jumped).Unlike the present perfect, the past perfect can readily beused with an adverb specifying a past time frame for theoccurrence. For example, it is incorrect to say *I havedone it last Friday (the use of last Friday, specifying thepast time, would entail the use of the simple past, I didit, rather than the present perfect). However there is nosuch objection to a sentence like I had done it the previ-ous Friday, where the past perfect is accompanied by aspecication of the time of occurrence.[2]

    English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfectcontinuous) construction, such as had been working. Thisis the past equivalent of the present perfect progressive,and is used to refer to an ongoing action that continuedup to the past time of reference. For example: It hadbeen raining all night when he awoke.For more details and examples, see Uses of English verbforms, particularly the sections on the past perfect andpast perfect progressive.

    3.2.3 Other Germanic languages

    3.2.4 GermanIn German, the pluperfect (Plusquamperfekt, Prteri-tumperfekt, or Vorvergangenheit, lit. pre-past) is usedin much the same manner, normally in a nachdem sen-tence. The Plusquamperfekt is formed with the PartizipPerfekt (Partizip II) of the full lexical verb, plus the auxil-iary verb haben or sein in its preterite form, depending onthe full lexical verb in question. For example: Nachdemich aufgestanden war, ging ich ins Badezimmer. After Ihad got up, I went into the bathroom. German allows for adouble perfect construction, both in Perfect and Pluper-

    fect. Double Pluperfect is formed by having the properauxiliary in Preterite, the main verb in Partizip Perfekt,and another instance of the proper auxiliary in PartizipPefekt as well:

    Ich hatte sie gesehen gehabt.I had her seen had.

    Double perfect and pluperfect is common in southernGermany, where it has widely replaced common perfectand pluperfect. However, pluperfect is considered le-gitimate in standard language, adding another tense toGerman:[3]

    Ich umarmte sie. Ich hatte sie gesehen, nach-dem sie mir gewunken gehabt hatte.I embraced her. I had her seen, after she mewaved had had.

    As novels are written in preterite, the tense system isshifted and perfect becomes pluperfect. Double pluper-fect then can be used to assume the role of common plu-perfect. Also, it allows to add additional information:

    Er hatte seine Heroinsucht berwunden.He had his drug addiction overcame. It im-plies that the speaker isn't addicted to drugsanymore.

    Er hatte seine Heroinsucht berwundengehabt.He had his drug addiction overcame had. Itimplies that the speaker overcame his addictionbut relapsed.

    When using modal verbs, it is possible to either usethe modal verb in preterite or to use the proper auxiliar(haben for all modals):

    Es hatte regnen mssen/gemusst.It had rained must.INF/must.PART".(Must is usually left in innite. To use pastparticiple is uncommon for modals.)

    Es musste geregnet haben.It must.PRET rained have.

    There is a drastic shift of meaning between these variants:the rst sentences denote that it had been necessary torain in the past. The second sentence denotes that thespeaker assumed that it had rained.

  • 16 CHAPTER 3. PLUPERFECT

    3.2.5 DutchIn Dutch, the pluperfect (Voltooid verleden tijd) is formedsimilarly as in German: the voltooid deelwoord is com-bined with an auxiliary declination of hebben or zijn, de-pending on the full lexical verb: Voordat ik er erg in had,was het al twaalf uur geworden. - Before I noticed, it hadbecome noon already. In addition, pluperfect is some-times used instead of present perfect: Dat had ik al gezien(voordat jij het zag) - lit.: I had seen that (before you did).The parenthesized part is implied and, therefore, can beomitted.

    3.2.6 Romance languagesIn French the indicative pluperfect (Plus-que-parfait,more than perfect) is formed by taking the appropriateform of the imperfect indicative of the auxiliaries avoiror tre and adding the past participle, j'avais mang.In Italian there are two pluperfects in the indicative mood:the recent pluperfect (trapassato prossimo) is formed cor-respondingly to French by using the imperfect of the ap-propriate auxiliary verb (essere or avere) plus the pastparticiple. For example, Ero aamato perch non avevomangiato I was hungry because I had not eaten. The re-mote pluperfect (trapassato remoto) is formed by usingthe preterite of the appropriate auxiliary verb plus thepast participle. In the Italian consecutio temporum, thetrapassato remoto should be used for completed actionsin a clause subjugated to a clause whose verb is in thepreterite.

    Example (remote pluperfect): Dopo che lo ebbitrovato, lo vendetti. (After I had found it, I soldit)

    Example (recent pluperfect): Dopo che lo avevotrovato, lo vendevo. (After I had found it, I wouldsell it)

    The second example may refer to an event that happenedcontinuously or habitually in the past. (I.e. After I usedto nd it, I would sell it OR After I would nd it, I wouldsell it). The rst example, being the preterite, refers onlyto actions completed once in the remote past, or distantpast.In Spanish, the pluperfect (pluscuamperfecto, or anteco-pretrito) is (similarly) formed from the imperfect of theauxiliary verb haber plus the past participle. For exam-ple, Haba comido cuando mi madre vino. I had eatenwhen my mother came.In Portuguese, there is a synthetic pluperfect (mais-que-perfeito). For example, Quando cheguei, soube que omeu amigo morrera 'When I came, I found out that myfriend had died'. Its use has become mostly literary, how-ever, and in spoken Portuguese, the pluperfect is usu-

    ally formed using the auxiliary verb ter plus the past par-ticiple. For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meuamigo tinha morrido. A more formal way of express-ing the pluperfect uses the verb haver. For example:Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo havia morrido.In Judeo-Spanish, the Latin pluperfect forms with littlealteration have been preserved (e.g. nal /m/ and /t/ aredropped) to express this tense (pluskuamperfekto), whichis identical in form to the imperfect subjunctive. It has asimilar form to the Portuguese, thus the Portuguese ex-ample above in Jidyo is, Kuando yeg suve ke mi havermorera 'When I came I knew that my friend had died'.It remains the main spoken form, though in some vari-eties, similarly to Spanish or Portuguese, the pluperfectis formed using the auxiliary verbs tener or aver plus thepast participle. For example, Kuando yeg suve ke mihaver tuve morido or Kuando yeg suve ke mi haver avamorido.In Romanian, the pluperfect (mai mult ca perfect) is ex-pressed without any auxiliary words, using a particularform of the verb, originated in the Latin pluperfect sub-junctive.[4] (compare Italian imperfect subjunctive Sem-brava che Elsa non venisse with Romanian pluperfectPrea c Elsa nu venise). For example, in Cnd l-amntrebat, el vzuse deja lmul 'When I asked him, he hadalready seen the movie'. The verb vzuse is in the plu-perfect form of a vedea 'to see'. Technically, this form isobtained from the singular third person form of the sim-ple perfect tense by adding specic terminations for eachperson and number. However, in northern Transylvaniathere is a regional way to state the pluperfect (that may re-ect the German inuence). The pluperfect is expressedby combining the auxiliary verb fost or the short versionfo'" (= was in English or war in German) with theparticiple, which (quite dicult to explain) is stated inits feminine form. Examples: o fost foast" (or o fo'foast") = he had been; am fost vzut" = I had beenseen; or fost venit" = they had come.In Galician, the pluperfect ( Pretrito pluscuamperfecto)is a simple tense formed by inecting the verb: fuxiras =you (sg.) had ed.

    3.2.7 Slavic languagesIn some of the Slavic languages the pluperfect has fallenout of use or is rarely used; pluperfect meaning is oftenexpressed using the ordinary past tense, with some adverb(such as earlier) or other periphrastic construction toindicate prior occurrence.All of the Russian, the Ukrainian language and theBelarusian language still preserve a distinct pluperfect( or davn'omynulyjas or zaproy as) that is formed by preceding the verbwith buv / bula in Ukrainian and by / bya in Belarusian(literally, 'was). It was and still is used in daily speech,especially in rural areas. Being mostly unused in litera-

  • 3.5. SEE ALSO 17

    ture during Soviet times, it is now regaining popularity.Here is an example of usage: Ja bylo pool uzhe, kogdavdrug vspomnil... (Russian), Ja ve buv pov, a raptomzhadav... (Ukrainian) and Ja o by pajo, kali rap-tam zhada (Belarusian) I almost had gone already whenI recalled...In Slovenian, the pluperfect (predpreteklik, 'before thepast') is formed with the verb 'to be' (biti) in past tenseand the participle of the main verb. It is used to denote acompleted action in the past before another action (Prednekaj leti so bile vode poplavile vsa nabreja Savinje, 'Afew years ago, all the banks of Savinja River had beenooded) or, with a modal verb, a past event that shouldhave happened (Moral bi ti bil povedati, 'I should havetold you'). Its use is considered archaic and is used rarelyeven in the written literary language.In Polish there is no pluperfect except of texts written inor stylized to Old Polish, where it was formed with past(perfect) tense of by to be and past participle of themain verb. The person marking is movable, e.g. zrobibyem ~ zrobiem by I had done. Past tense of the ad-jectival verbs (powinienem by I should have done it)and conditional mood (zrobibym by I would have doneit) are often wrongly considered pluperfect forms.In Serbian and Croatian, the pluperfect (pluskvamper-fekt) is constructed with the past tense (perfekt) of theverb to be (biti) plus the adjective form of the mainverb. For example: Ja sam bio uio, which means, Ihad been studying.For examples of pluperfects in Bulgarian andMacedonian, see the table below.

    3.2.8 Other languages

    In Welsh, the pluperfect is formed without an auxiliaryverb, usually by interpolating -as- before the simple pastending: parhasem, we had remained.In Finnish, the pluperfect (pluskvamperfekti) is con-structed with an auxiliary verb olla 'to be', which is inthe past tense. The primary verbs get the past participleendings -nyt/-nut in singular, -neet in plural forms (the 'n'assimilates with certain consonants) and -ttu/-tty/-tu/-tyin passive forms.

    3.3 Table of forms

    3.4 Dierent perfect constructionIn German and French there is an additional way to con-struct a pluperfect by doubling the perfect tense parti-cles. This is called doubled perfect (doppeltes Perfekt) orsuper perfect (Superperfekt) in German[5] and plus pastperfect (temps surcompos) in French.[6] These forms are

    not commonly used in written language and they are nottaught in school.Both languages allow to construct a past tense with amodal verb (like English to have, in German haben,in French avoir), for example I have heard it. Thisis largely equivalent to the usage in English. The addi-tional perfect tense is constructed by putting the modalverb (to have) in the past tense as if being the full verb(I have had) followed by the actual verb in the past par-ticle mode (I have had heard it). The same applies tothose verbs which require to be (Deutsch sein, French"tre) as the modal verb for the construction of the pasttense (which would not work in English).In spoken language in Southern Germany the doubledperfect construction has largely replaced the StandardGerman pluperfect construction.In France it is uncommon in the Northern regions (withParisian inuence) but it can be found widely in Provenaldialects as well as in other regions around the world. Inall regions the doubled pluperfect (I had had heard it) isuncommon although it is possible - all of these forms em-phasize the perfect aspect by extending the modal verb sothat a doubled pluperfect would add upon the pluperfectin another part of the speech.

    German: Ich habe ihm geschrieben gehabt (in-stead of Ich hatte ihm geschrieben)German: Ich hatte ihm geschrieben gehabt (thedoubled pluperfect emphasis)French: Il a eu djeun (instead of Il avait d-jeun)French: Il a eu ni de djeuner (additional em-phasis on the perfect aspect)

    3.5 See also Conditional perfect Future perfect Grammatical aspect Past tense Perfect (grammar) Present perfect Pluperfect progressive Preterite (simple past)

    3.6 References[1] Comrie, Bernard, Tense, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985,

    p. 64.

  • 18 CHAPTER 3. PLUPERFECT

    [2] Comrie, Bernard, Tense, pp. 78-79.

    [3] Dudenverlag. Duden - Die Grammatik. Mannheim: Du-denverlag, 2009.

    [4] Manuela Nevaci. Observaii privind structura i evoluiaconjunctivului n aromn" (in Romanian). UniversitateaOvidius Constana. p. 2.

    [5] de:Doppeltes Perfekt

    [6] fr:Temps surcompos

    3.7 External links Grammar Tutorials - a column overview of the En-glish tenses

  • Chapter 4

    Tenseaspectmood

    Tenseaspectmood, commonly abbreviated tam andalso called tensemodalityaspect or tma, is thegrammatical system of a language that covers the expres-sion of tense (location in time), aspect (fabric of time a single block of time, continuous ow of time, or repet-itive occurrence), and mood or modality (degree of ne-cessity, obligation, probability, ability).[1] In some cases,evidentiality (whether evidence exists for the statement,and if so what kind) may also be included.The term is convenient because it is often dicult to un-tangle these features of a language. Often any two oftense, aspect, and mood (or all three) may be conveyedby a single grammatical construction, but this systemmaynot be complete in that not all possible combinations mayhave an available construction. In other cases there maynot be clearly delineated categories of tense and mood, oraspect and mood.For instance, many Indo-European lan-guages do not clearly distinguish tense fromaspect.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] In some languages, suchas Spanish and Modern Greek, the imperfective aspectis fused with the past tense in a form traditionallycalled the imperfect. Other languages with distinct pastimperfectives include Latin and Persian.In the traditional grammatical description of some lan-guages, including English, many Romance languages, andGreek and Latin, tense or the equivalent term in thatlanguage refers to a set of inected or periphrastic verbforms that express a combination of tense, aspect, andmood. In Spanish, the simple conditional (Spanish: con-dicional simple) is classied as one of the simple tenses(Spanish: tiempos simples), but is named for the mood(conditional) that it expresses. In Ancient Greek, theperfect tense (Ancient Greek: khrnos parakemenos)[11] is a set of forms that expressboth present tense and perfect aspect (nite forms), orsimply perfect aspect (non-nite forms).Not all languages conate tense, aspect, and mood, how-ever; close to a theoretically ideal distinction, with sep-arate grammatical markers for tense, aspect, and mood,is made in some analytic languages such as creole lan-guages.

    4.1 CreolesCreoles, both Atlantic and non-Atlantic, tend to share alarge number of syntactic features, including the avoid-ance of bound morphemes. Tense, aspect, and moodare usually indicated with separate invariant pre-verbalauxiliaries. Typically the unmarked verb is used for ei-ther the timeless habitual or the stative aspect or the pastperfective tenseaspect combination. In general creolestend to put less emphasis on marking tense than on mark-ing aspect. Typically aspectually unmarked stative verbscan be marked with the anterior tense, and non-statives,with or without the anterior marker, can optionally bemarked for the progressive, habitual, or completive aspector for the irrealis mood. In some creoles the anterior canbe used to mark the counterfactual. When any of tense,aspect, and modality are specied, they are typically in-dicated separately with the invariant pre-verbal markersin the sequence anterior relative tense (prior to the timefocused on), irrealis mode (conditional or future), non-punctual aspect.[12]:pp. 1769, p. 191;[13][14]

    4.1.1 Hawaiian Creole English

    Main article: Hawaiian Pidgin Grammatical features

    Hawaiian Creole English (HCE), or Hawaiian Pidgin, is acreole language with most of its vocabulary drawn fromits superstrate English, but as with all creoles its gram-mar is very dierent from that of its superstrate. HCEverbs[15] have only two morphologically distinct forms:the unmarked form (e.g. teik take) and the progressiveform with the sux -in appended to the unmarked form(teikin taking). The past tense is indicated either bythe unmarked form or by the preverbal auxiliary wen (Aiwen see om I saw him) or bin (especially among olderspeakers) or haed (especially on Kauai). However, forto say the marked past tense has the obligatory irregu-lar form sed said, and there are optional irregular pasttense forms sin or saw = wen si saw, keim = wen kamcame, and tol = wen tel told. The past is indicatedonly once in a sentence since it is a relative tense.The future marker is the preverbal auxiliary gon or goin

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    am/is/are going to": gon bai is going to buy. The futureof the past tense/aspect uses the future form since the useof the past tense form to mark the time of perspectiveretains its inuence throughout the rest of the sentence:Da gai sed hi gon ks mi ap (The guy said he [was] gonnax me up).There are various preverbal modal auxiliaries: kaencan, laik want to, gata have got to, haeftu haveto, baeta had better, sapostu am/is/are supposed to.Tense markers are used infrequently before modals: gonkaen kam is going to be able to come. Waz was canindicate past tense before the future marker gon and themodal sapostu: Ai waz gon lift weits I was gonna liftweights"; Ai waz sapostu go I was supposed to go.There is a preverbal auxiliary yustu for past tense habit-ual aspect: yustu tink so (used to think so). The pro-gressive aspect can be marked with the auxiliary ste inplace of or in addition to the verbal sux -in: Wat yuste it? = Wat yu itin? (What are you eating?"); Wi stemekin da plaen (We're making the plan). The latter,double-marked, form tends to imply a transitory natureof the action. Without the sux, ste can alternativelyindicate perfective aspect: Ai ste kuk da stu awredi (Icooked the stew already); this is true, for instance, af-ter a modal: yu sapostu ste mek da rais awredi (You'resupposed to have made the rice already). Stat is an aux-iliary for inchoative aspect when combined with the ver-bal sux -in: gon stat plein (gonna start playing). Theauxiliary pau without the verbal sux indicates comple-tion: pau tich nish(ed) teaching. Aspect auxiliariescan co-occur with tense markers: gon ste plei (gonna beplaying); wen ste it (was eating).

    4.2 Modern GreekMain article: Modern Greek grammar Verb

    Modern Greek[16]:pp. 5076 distinguishes the perfectiveand imperfective aspects by the use of two dierent verbstems. For the imperfective aspect, suxes are usedto indicate the past tense indicative mood, the n