aspectually

Aspectually is an adverb used in linguistics to indicate that a statement, interpretation, or analysis concerns aspect, the grammatical category that encodes how an event is viewed with respect to time (for example, ongoing, habitual, or completed). It signals that the focus is on the aspectual properties of a verb phrase rather than on straightforward temporal sequencing. The term derives from aspectual plus the adverbial suffix -ly.

In use, aspectually often appears in theoretical or descriptive discussions to qualify claims about how a clause conveys aspect. For example, a researcher might describe a sentence as aspectually neutral if its verb morphology or context does not strongly commit to a particular aspect, or aspectually marked to indicate a specific reading (such as a completed or ongoing action). The word is more common in scholarly prose than in everyday speech.

The concept of aspectually related analysis is central to cross-linguistic studies of tense and aspect, where languages encode aspect through verb inflections, auxiliary constructions, or particles. Researchers examine how aspectual marking interacts with tense, mood, and event structure, and how these interactions shape interpretation.

See also: aspect, perfective, imperfective, aspectualization, tense and aspect theory. Aspectually remains primarily a technical term used by linguists and philosophers of language when discussing how events are construed in discourse and grammar.