Aspect in Atlas: permanent or non-permanent?
So here we are again. This has been hot topic in various forums, and had a couple of questions about it via e-mail too, so let's do a post about it. Why not? First of all, what is aspect? Basically it indicates how an event spands over time. I am eating - I ate - I have eaten - I eat - ... There are many different kinds of aspect: - imperfective - perfective - pefect - aorist - prospective - ... Many languages have aspect as one of their features. Some do it via interfixes or suffixes (Spanish for instance), via particles (Chinese), or adverbs (Indonesian). Out of the aspects listed above (and many more), different languages use different aspects, and even if they use the same one, they can have different views on it. So take for instance the perfect aspect in Spanish and in English: - I have finished - Yo he acabado/acabé Some dialects in Spanish use the equivalent to the English ones, while others would use the perfective ("acabé") for the same situation. ...