Stages in Developmental Pattern

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3. Grammatical Aspects

In the present time, grammar is defined as a study of languages; it studies on how to put the words together to create meaning. In addition, grammar also means as a set of standards that must be followed by language learners in order to speak and write better Woods and Friedman, 2010. Moreover, Greenbaum and Nelson 2002 refer the word ‘grammar’ as a set of rules that allows the language users to combine words into larger units, a sentence. The English sentences have many elements that make it a sentence. The most basic element in an English sentence is a verb Yule, 1996. Studying grammar is important for language learners. As stated by Greenbaum and Nelson, an application of grammatical study is beneficial for language learners, i.e. 1 learners who recognize a grammatical structure can obtain important knowledge to understand about punctuations, 2 understanding native grammars of certain languages is useful if the language learners learn a new language, 3 in interpreting texts, grammar knowledge is helpful as the analysis of grammar becomes the main aspect, and 4 study of the English grammar can also give a benefit for the learners when they have to write, it provides help to determine and choose the best available options. Tenses are used to indicate the time when an action or event takes place or when a state or process holds. Tenses refer to the moment of speaking. According to Palmer 1984, morphologically, there are only two tenses in the English language, past and present. The “future” is not considered as a tense because it requires auxiliary verbs to form verbs that indicate future time. It is different with present and past tenses that do not need any auxiliary verbs to indicate the present and past time. To indicate the present and past time one can 33 simply change the verb forms, as demonstrated by speaks and spoke. In general, a tense indicates whether an action is taking a place in the past, in the present or in the future time. Hamm and Bott 2014 adds that a different indication in tenses is created by modifying the verbs by adding or altering the verbs with additional morpheme such as -ed. In a sentence, a tense comes together with a grammatical aspect. As one of the grammatical categories, the grammatical aspects provide information about a state of an action indicated by the verbs in a sentence. The concern of this grammatical aspect is on the state of temporality expressed by the verb. Palmer 1984 adds, “The term ‘aspect’ is often used to refer both to the progressive and to the perfect, though the term ‘phase’ has been suggested for the later”. Comrie 1976 argues, “Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation.” This idea supports the notion of state of temporality as proposed by Palmer. Comrie also adds that the aspects and tenses are concerned with time; therefore, the way they are connected is in a different way. In addition, Comrie also differentiates grammatical aspects in English into two major parts: perfective and imperfective. Each of part carries different meaning related to the temporal states. The differentiation of the perceptive form and the imperfective from does not lie on the duration of an action. It is possible to have an action with a long duration to have an imperfective aspect and other way around that an action with a short duration has a perfective aspect. The perfective aspect refers to a “completed” action while imperfective aspects refer to a not “complete’ action. The imperfective aspect is broken down into two types: habitual and continuous. The habitual aspect refers to an action 34 that regularly takes place, while the continuous aspect refers to an action that is still taking a place at the moment of speaking. The continuous aspect is divided into two: non-progressive and progressive. Non-progressive aspect deals with action that has no duration, in contrast, the progressive aspect concerns with actions emphasizing the duration. Figure 2. 5 Diagram of grammatical aspects in English Comrie, 1976 In addition to Comrie’s idea about grammatical aspects, Murcia and Freeman 1999 mention four categories of grammatical aspects in English: simple aspect, perfect aspect, progressive aspect and the combination of the perfect and the progressive aspects. In contrast to Palmer 1984 who agrees that there are only two tenses in the English, Murcia and Freeman believes that there are three time references or tenses in English; they are the present, the past, and the future times. Therefore, Murcia and Freeman agrees that the combination of the tenses and aspects constructs the 12 traditional tenses. The following chart provides a summary of combinations between the four grammatical aspects and the three