Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines both typological studies of aspect and tense as well as case studies of individual languages. All languages have lexical aspect. Lexical aspect refers to the inherent temporal properties encoded in verb stems and other lexical items. The most common categorizations of lexical aspect come from philosophy rather than linguistics, although these studies never use the linguistic term aspect. Cross-linguistic variation in aspectual interpretation is attributed to how languages select and use the various aspectual classes provided by the grammar. An investigation of grammatical aspect in a variety of languages suggests that imperfective and perfective are also asymmetrical universal oppositions. The asymmetrical semantics of the lexical and grammatical aspect features corresponds to a theoretical construct from the phonological feature literature known as a privative opposition, introduced by Trubetzkoy.