Die Kategorie ‚Aspekt‘ im kontrastiven Sprachvergleich

Abstract

Aspect is a grammatical category allowing the speaker to individually refer to an action or event which can be either in progress or completed. Whereas the Slavonic languages have developed a morphologically structured system in order to denote aspect, the Germanic or Romance languages only possess rudimentary forms of aspect differentiation. In Korean, as an agglutinative language, aspect is expressed by adding suffixes to the verb or by forming a complex verb which contains an aspect verb. In some cases temporal adverbs are needed for the disambiguation of sentences with temporal aspectuality. Bhatt/Schmidt (1993:71ff) claim the existence of a Rhenish progressive form for the German language, similar to the progressive forms in English. The category aspect should be considered in close connection with the categories of action, tense and eventuality.