Aspect

Speakers of any language convey a large amount of information about situations and time. They can represent a given action as ongoing or as completed; they can represent it as having taken place once or as being repeated or as being a habit. We can locate a situation in past, present or future time and we can locate situations in time relative to other situations in a fairly subtle fashion. Whether a situation is ongoing or completed, repeated or habitual comes under the heading of aspect, which can be thought of as the aspect or view which a speaker offers of a particular situation. The location of a situation in past, present or future time, or of two situations relative to each other in time, comes under the heading of tense, which derives from the French word temps (time).