ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—The concept of aspect, which appeared in Russian grammars of the nineteenth century and rapidly spread to all Slavic languages, took a very long time to find its way into the grammars of languages like French and English, which do not have a system of morphological markers devoted to its expression (→GRAMMAR, MORPHOLOGY). French owes the first real efforts to theorize aspect-related phenomena to Gustave Guillaume. Guillaume distinguished two kinds of time. One serves as a framework for locating occurrences (states or events) in time; the other is internal to the occurrence (the time it takes to unfold), which, strictly speaking, is the aspect of the occurrence (→TIME AND TENSE). Another distinction that gradually became vital was between two main types of aspect. Lexical aspect, which is marked by the verbal lexeme and its semantic-case environment (→LEXICON, THEMATIC RELATION), defines the type of occurrence. Grammatical aspect, essentially expressed by the verb tense and certain adverbs of aspect, is the presentation mode of the occurrence (the way it is perceived or taken into account).
