L'aspettualità nella lingua. Marcature morfologiche e effetti di soggettività

While tense is a deictic category that implies an explicit or implicit reference to the time of enunciation, or to when action occurs, aspect is a non–deictic category, which does not imply any reference to the time of enunciation but only to how the action takes place. Aspects are ways to see the temporal internal structure of a situation and in this sense constitute as many subjective attitudes. Grammatical categories of particular languages often combine the aspect (implying notions of the completeness or incompleteness of an action) with tense (indicating relations of precedence and succession).Within the aspectual dimension, three notions, which are often confused, are to be distinguished,. The first is that of aspect in a proper sense, articulated in the perfective and imperfective dimension. It is a grammatical notion that involves a morphological mark and affects the whole verbal system. The second notion concerns what is sometimes referred to as “Aktionsart” (mode of action), which is realized by derivation or composition and has as usual formal marking some prefixes or affixes. It is not general in the sense that it does not concern the whole of the verbal system, but only lexical differences. The third notion concerns the semantic aspectual composition of certain verbs, independently from any morphological marking. The aspect is a phenomenon that, in a proper sense, can only be found in linguistic systems: in non–linguistic systems we can speak of aspects only in a metaphorical sense.