perfectlyive

Perfectlyive is a proposed linguistic category describing a hypothetical aspect that combines the standard perfective with an evaluative, outcome-focused component. In theories that explore aspect and evidentiality, perfectlyive marks indicate that a completed action not only reaches a terminal state but does so with an assessment of excellence or flawlessness.

The term is recent and not widely attested in natural language data. It appears in a small set of theoretical discussions since the early 2010s, where researchers use it as a tool to model how speakers encode both completion and outcome quality. Because it is largely theoretical, its cross-linguistic status remains debated and no consensus exists on its universality or even its distinctness from existing categories such as the perfective or resultative constructions.

In proposed analyses, perfectlyive may co-occur with evidential or modal markers and can interact with tense. It is often described as marking the result of the action as ideal or maximum, sometimes implying certainty about the outcome. Its morphology is not standardized; authors illustrate it with pseudo-forms such as finish-perfective-ive to signal the combined meaning, rather than claiming a concrete grammatical form in a particular language.

Examples are typically hypothetical. A gloss might be: Adam finish-Perfective-ive: “Adam finished the task in a way that is judged flawless.” This is intended to show the semantic contribution rather than to document a real language.

See also: Aspect; Perfective; Evidentiality; Resultative constructions; Language typology.