What Is Verbal Aspect?
In the preceding section you were introduced to the five characteristics of individual verbs. Each category probably made sense to you on its own, but the idea of Latin having six verb tenses may have been a little puzzling. Six does, after all, seem a bit many. If you take the idea of verb tense as a reference to time, it is. Present, past, future. What else can there be? To answer that question, you need to know about something called verbal aspect.
In Proto-Indo-European, Latin's grandmother language, there were nine different unique tense forms, one for each aspect and time frame. Greek, Latin's sister, dropped them to seven; Latin condensed them to six; and distant cousin English distilled them to just one, making up for the rest with helping verbs and participles.
Simply put, verbal aspect refers to the way a speaker views an action. In other words, is the action treated as something in progress and unfolding before your eyes, like the way a film unfolds before its audience? Or is the speaker referring to something that is all done? Another possibility is that the speaker is discussing an action in a more casual, general way, without specifying process or completion.
Take a look at TABLE 3-1 below. The rows give time reference points for an action; the columns show the viewpoint (i.e., aspect).
Table 3-1 Action and Aspects
