grammatical aspect

grammatical aspect (plural grammatical aspects)

1. (grammar, semantics) The aspect of a verb phrase (verb group) or other predicate – its temporal structure or relationship to the time of use – marked through any of various grammatical elements, as distinguished from lexical aspect.

   Antonyms: lexical aspect, aktionsart

   Hyponyms: perfective aspect, imperfective aspect, progressive aspect, aorist aspect, iterative aspect

   • 2010, Miren Hodgson, Telicity and the Syntax-Semantics of the Object and Subject, page 11:

     While lexical aspect presents information about the inherent lexical properties of the verb and verb phrase, grammatical aspect, on the other hand, signals the boundaries of an event.

   • 2014, Barbara Meisterernst, Tense and Aspect in Han Period Chinese‎, page 15:

     Within the framework of a distinction between grammatical and lexical aspect, the category grammatical aspect, which is usually realized in the morphology of the verb, includes the imperfective and the perfective aspect, whereas the lexical aspect concerns the situation types (Aktionsarten) of the verb, i.e. it is inherent to the semantics of the verb.

The unmarked term aspect is frequently used to refer to grammatical aspect; the latter term is used to distinguish from lexical aspect.