Page "Grammatical aspect" Paragraph 5

Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a language, distinguished through overt inflection, derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required markers of those aspects.

For example, the K ' iche ' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k-and x-to mark incompletive and completive aspect ; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers-le 了 ,-zhe 着, zài-在, and-guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs ; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle.

Even languages that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other syntactic constructions.