Aspectary

Aspectary is a term used to describe a framework for organizing and analyzing aspectual information in language and related computational work. It is often treated as a generic label for schemas that encode how languages grammatically and semantically encode time-relative viewpoints of events, such as perfective versus imperfective aspect and related notions like Aktionsart or telicity.

Origin and scope: In scholarly and technical discussions, aspectary refers to data models, annotation schemes, and tooling designed to standardize the representation of aspectual features across languages and corpora.

Components typically include a taxonomy of aspectual classes (perfective, imperfective, habitual, iterative), an annotation schema for marking sentences or events, a data model for storing annotations, and validation protocols for consistency and inter-annotator agreement.

Applications include linguistic description, corpus annotation, and natural language processing. An aspectary can support cross-language comparisons of aspect systems, improve automatic temporality understanding, and assist in training and evaluating models that distinguish ongoing, habitual, and completed events.

Challenges include linguistic variation in how aspect is encoded, polysemy of form-meaning mappings, and the absence of universal consensus on class boundaries.

See also: aspect, Aktionsart, telicity, aspectual annotation, corpus linguistics, aspect-oriented programming.