Lexical Aspect in Laki Dialect

One essential semantic category, along with other categories formulated in the verb (such as mood and tense), is aspect. Aspect can be considered as the way of looking at the events in terms of their inception, realization, unfolding or completion. While grammatical aspect is usually expressed with a definite inflectional or periphrastic element in VP, aspectual verbs, inherently without any specific grammatical sign, unfold the intrinsic aspectual properties indicating the beginning, continuation or completion of the events. Reviewing the current approaches to lexical aspect, the present research attempts to study and classify the aspectual verbs in Laki (one of the Northwestern Iranian languages) to show that based on Croft’s model (2012), the Laki dialect has four major lexical aspectual types (including static, activity, accomplishment and achievement) and 10 subcategories including transitory states, acquired permanent states, inherent permanent states, directed activities, undirected (cyclic) activities, directed accomplishments, undirected accomplishments, reversible achievements, irreversible achievements, cyclic achievements.