week 3

Progressive aspect
Definition
Progressive aspect is a continuous aspect that expresses processes, not states.
Example (English)
• The be + -ing construction indicates progressive aspect. Its characteristic of expressing processes rather than states can be seen in the following examples:
• Fred is silly.
• Fred is being silly.
The first example is stative; the second is processual and paraphrasable as "Fred is acting in a silly manner."
The progressive, or continuous, aspect is formed with the auxiliary verb 'to be' + - ing, the present participle. It shows that an action or state, past, present, or future, was, is or will be unfinished at the time referred to:
I'm reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography. (action unfinished now)
She was having a shower when the phone rang. (action unfinished at the time the phone rang)

The perfective aspect (abbreviated PFV), sometimes called the aoristic aspect,[1] is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms variously called "aorist", "preterite", and "simple past". Although the essence of the perfective is an event seen as a whole, a unit without internal structure, most languages which have a perfective use it for various similar semantic roles, such as momentary events and the onsets or completions of events, all of which are single points in time and thus have no internal structure. Other languages instead have separate momentane, inchoative, or cessative aspects for those roles, with or without a general perfective.
The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imperfective aspect, which presents an event as having internal structure (such as ongoing or habitual actions), and from the prospective aspect, which describes impending action.