Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 1 Having clarified the difference between habituality and iterativity, we may now turn to the definition of habituality itself. The feature that is com­mon to habituality is that its means describe a situation which is character­istic of an extended period of time, so extended that the situation referred […]

Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 1 Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 2 Definitions of progressiveness found in some traditional grammars, along the lines of describing a situation in progress, often fail to bring out the difference between progressiveness and imperfectivity. So, in what does progressiveness differ from imperfectivity? Firstly, imperfectivity includes […]

Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 1 Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 2 Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 3 In addition to this, the Progressive in English has a number of other specific uses that do not seem to fit under the general definition of progres­siveness, for instance in I’ve […]

The Perfect in English is rather different from the aspects, since it tells us nothing directly about the situation in itself, but rather relates some state to a preceding situation. As a preliminary illustration of this, we may con­trast the English sentences I have lost (Perfect) my gloves and I lost (non-Perfect) my gloves. One […]

Verb: Meaning of Present Perfect form – Part 1 Perfect of result In the Perfect of result, a present state is referred to as being the result of some past situation: this is one of the clearest manifestations of the present relevance of a past situation. Thus, one of the possible differences between John has […]

All verbal forms – both finite and non-finite – are characterized by as­pectual meanings (cf. to have written, having written), but finite forms are impossible without temporal parameters and meanings. In correlation be­tween tense and aspect in finite forms, aspect is a permanent characteristic of a class, whereas tense is obligatory but variable (Present Progressive […]

Aspect is quite different from tense. The difference in English between he was reading and he read is’ not one of tense, since in both cases we have absolute past tense. It is in this sense that we speak of aspect as being dis­tinct from tense, and insist on such an opposition as that between […]

Verb aspect: Definition – Part 1 All theoretical works on the category of aspect in Germanic languages may be easily divided into two types. The first shows a purely semantic ap­proach that describes actions without paying any attention to the way they are expressed. As a result, aspect is seen not as an element of […]

Pronouns are characterized by an extremely generalizing meaning: they point out objects, entities, abstract notions and their qualities without nam­ing them. This generalizing part of speech is actualized contextually, and is deprived of any meaning outside a particular context. In other words, pro­nouns never name an object or its quality, pronouns only point them out […]

In English, there is a clear distinction between direct and indirect speech. In direct speech, the original speaker’s exact words are reproduced, without any change whatsoever, as in John said yesterday, ‘I’ll send you the data tomorrow‘. Note in particular that in this example the pronoun / refers to the original speaker, i.e. John; the […]