Tense-Aspect System Essay

Each language has its own parameters that make it different from other languages (Chomsky, 1981). Among these parameters is the tense-aspect system. Tense-aspect system is language-specific temporal features which can be expressed by different linguistic means, namely, grammatical inflections, copulas and lexical properties of the verb (inherent meaning of the verb) (Comrie, 1976; Dahl, 1985). More specifically, these grammatical means are used to express events or states in the past, present and future time. For example, in English the inflectional (ing) is used to mark a progressive event whereas the prefix (ya) is used to express a progressive event in Arabic. For a learner to speak a target language properly, s/he must adopt these linguistic

Thus, there are two types of aspect: grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. Grammatical aspect is marked explicitly by grammatical morphemes (ed, ing in English and ya, aa in Arabic) or auxiliary (Kana), and it is concerned with viewing the (in)completeness of a situation or an action ((Klein, 1994). Hence, linguists divide grammatical aspect into Perfective and Imperfective aspect. The former refers to a situation as a whole, describing its beginning and end while the latter describes the internal form of the situation, displaying it as an ongoing (progressive) situation with no endpoint (Comrie, 1976). The sentences ‘John wrote a letter’ and ‘John is writing a letter now’ best illustrate the differences between Perfective and Imperfective aspect.

Lexical aspect, by contrast, is concerned with the semantic properties of the verb. Unlike grammatical aspect, lexical aspect (sometimes it is aktionsart) does not represent the view of the speaker for a situation; it rather carries the inherent meaning of the verb or the verb phrase (Collin, 2000). Thus, Lexical aspect is not explicitly marked by morphological inflections or copulas. For instance, the phrases feel happy and run a mile express stative and accomplishment events, respectively, relying on their inherent meaning rather than the grammatical