TenseAspect

Tense and aspect are grammatical categories that express time and temporal structure in verbs. Tense situates an event in time relative to speech time (the speech time), while aspect describes how the event unfolds over time. In many languages, tense and aspect are encoded together, but they can also be expressed separately through distinct markers or auxiliary constructions.

Most languages distinguish past, present, and future as tense categories, although some lack a dedicated future marker and rely on context or particles. Aspect marks features such as whether an event is in progress, finished, repeatable, or results-oriented. The distinction between tense and aspect is cross-linguistic but not universal; some languages have rich aspect systems with little or no tense marking, others fuse the two.

Common aspectual contrasts include imperfective versus perfective. Imperfective views the event as ongoing or undetermined in duration; perfective presents a viewed boundary, often completed. Subtypes include progressive or continuous aspect (I am eating), habitual aspect (I swim every day), and perfect aspect (I have eaten), among others. Some languages also encode prospective, completive, or resultative nuances.

English typically marks both tense and aspect (I walk, I am walking, I have walked, I walked). Other languages illustrate different patterns: Mandarin uses particles like le and zhe for aspectual meaning rather than inflectional tense; many languages rely more on aspect to situate time than on tense. Understanding tense-aspect helps explain how languages encode time and how speakers construct temporal meaning.