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Discontinuous past: In English a sentence such as "I put it on the table" is neutral in implication (the object could still be on the table or not), but in some languages such as Chichewa the equivalent tense carries an implication that the object is no longer there. It is thus the opposite of the perfect aspect.
taiyou-wa sun- TOP higashi-kara east-from nobo-ru rise- IPFV taiyou-wa higashi-kara nobo-ru sun-TOP east-from rise-IPFV "the sun rises in the east" whereas the ga (subject) particle would force an episodic reading. English English has no means of morphologically distinguishing a gnomic aspect; however, a generic reference is generally understood to convey an equivalent meaning. Use of the ...
Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although the same word patterns are used for expressing more than one of these meanings at the same time in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages. (See tense–aspect–mood for a discussion of this.)
The continuous aspect is constructed by using a form of the copula, "to be", together with the present participle (marked with the suffix -ing). [6] It is generally used for actions that are occurring at the time in question, and does not focus on the larger time-scale. For example, the sentence "Andrew was playing tennis when Jane called him."
[18]: p.76 The indicative mood has simple forms (one word, but conjugated by person and number) for the present tense, the imperfective aspect in the past tense, the perfective aspect in the past, and the future (and the future form can also be used to express present probability, as in the English "It will be raining now").
For example, the English verbs arrive and run differ in their lexical aspect since the former describes an event which has a natural endpoint while the latter does not. Lexical aspect differs from grammatical aspect in that it is an inherent semantic property of a predicate , while grammatical aspect is a syntactic or morphological property.
The basic (present) perfect form, with the auxiliary in the present tense, may specifically carry the meaning of perfect aspect, as in English; however in some languages it is used more generally as a past tense (or preterite), as in French and German. The use of auxiliaries and meaning of the constructions in various languages are described below.
In the case of absolute tense, the grammatical expression of time reference is made relative to the present moment. It has been pointed out that the term is somewhat misleading, since this kind of time reference is not truly absolute, but is relative to the moment of speaking. [3] Most simple sentences in tensed languages exhibit absolute tense.