What’s your favorite grammatical aspect?

While grammatical tense has to do with when in time an action happens, grammatical aspect is about how in time an action happens: Does the event extend over a period of time or just happen once? Is the event repeated/habitual? etc.

For example, in many dialects of English the present tense has two aspects:

• present simple:I run.

• present progressive:I am running.

Both are present tense, but the way the event is conceptualized is different. One is conceptualized as happening as a single point in time, while the other is conceptualized as happening over a period of time.

Here’s a list of grammatical aspects! Which is your favorite? What are some cool aspects in other languages?

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