Imperfective aspect

English has no general imperfective. The English progressive is used to describe ongoing events, but can also be used in past tense, such as "The rain was beating down". Habitual situations do not have their own verb form (in most dialects), but the construction "used to" conveys past habitual action, as in I used to ski. The simple past tense can be used for situations presented as ongoing, such as The rain beat down continuously through the night. The progressive and imperfective contrast in stative verbs. Stative verbs, such as know, do not use the progressive (*I was knowing Ada), while in many languages with an imperfective (for instance, French), they do (je connaissais Ada). == Indo-Aryan languages ==

Verbs in Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) have their grammatical aspects overtly marked. Periphrastic Hindi-Urdu verb forms (participle verb forms) consist of two elements, the first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense-mood marker. There are two independent imperfective aspects in Hindi-Urdu: Habitual Aspect, and Progressive Aspect. These two aspects are formed from their participle forms being used with the copula verb of Hindi which is होना honā (to be). However, the aspectual participles can also have the verbs रहना rêhnā (to stay/remain), आना ānā (to come) & जाना jānā (to go) as their copula. The table below shows three verbs होना honā (to be), करना karnā (to do), and मरना marnā (to die) in their aspectual infinitive forms using different copulas. Some translations are approximate, and the nuance cannot be expressed exactly in English. Some aspectual forms also have the same translations in English but are not interchangeable in Hindi-Urdu. Now, these copula verbs (besides होना honā) can themselves be converted into their participle forms and put into one of the three different aspects of Hindi-Urdu, which are habitual, progressive, and perfective aspects, hence generating sub-aspectual infinitive forms. This way a verb form combining two grammatical aspects is constructed. The table below shows the combined aspectual forms: ''The perfective subaspect of the habitual main aspect (habitual) also is imperfective (habitual). Also, these sub-aspects are even more nuanced that it is not possible to translate each of them into English in a unique way. Some translations don't even make sense in English.'' ==Slavic languages==

Verbs in Slavic languages have a perfective and/or an imperfective form. Generally, any of various prefixes can turn imperfectives into perfectives; suffixes can turn perfectives into imperfectives. The non-past imperfective form is used for the present, while its perfective counterpart is used for the future. There is also a periphrastic imperfective future construction. == Other languages ==

The imperfective aspect may be fused with the past tense, for a form traditionally called the imperfect. In some cases, such as Spanish and Portuguese, this is because the imperfective aspect occurs only in the past tense; others, such as Georgian and Bulgarian, have both general imperfectives and imperfects. Other languages with distinct past imperfectives include Latin and Persian. ==Perfective==

The opposite aspect is the perfective (in Ancient Greek, generally called the aorist), which views a situation as a simple whole, without interior composition. (This is not the same as the perfect.) Unlike most other tense–aspect category oppositions, it is typical for a language not to choose either perfective or imperfective as being generally marked and the other as being generally unmarked. This is the essence of the perfective aspect: an event presented as an unanalyzed whole. 'Was reading', however, is different. Besides being the background to 'entered', the form 'reading' presents "an internal portion of John's reading, [with] no explicit reference to the beginning or to the end of his reading." Here each sitting is an unanalyzed whole, a simple event, so the perfective root of the verb 'sat' is used. However, the clause as a whole describes an ongoing event conceived of as having internal structure, so the imperfective suffix -eshe is added. Without the suffix, the clause would read simply as In the evening he sat on the veranda. ==References==