Prospective Aspect and Aktionsart in Persian

Aspect refers to different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation. It is divided into grammatical and lexical aspects. The focus of “grammatical aspect” is on the event being completed, in progress, or prospective, while in “lexical aspect”, such characteristics as dynamicity, duration, and telicity are considered based on the inherent meaning of the verb. Predicates referring to future are usually different from those denoting past or present; the events related to the past have happened, those related to the present are in progress, and a prospective event refers to the possibility of its occurrence in future, thus being neither true nor false at the moment of speaking. Speakers talk about the events related to future in various syntactic and morphological forms with different degrees of certainty. The objective of this paper was to analyze the prospective aspect of Aktionsart in Persian based on a functional approach so as to determine which aspectual classes could be used in prospective aspect. The data were collected from the spoken and written sentences used in the websites, mass media, and daily conversations. Considering data showed that most state verbs, due to the non-agentivity of their subject, cannot denote prospective aspect, but in some cases context is determinative in representing prospectivity. The distinction between progression and prospective aspect in activity verbs is mostly context-dependent. Progression in achievement verbs usually refers to the events that will happen imminently, while the possibility of the event to happen imminently or distantly from the present moment can be represented in accomplishments with regard to the context. Therefore, perfective, imperfective, and perfect aspects could represent prospective aspect of Aktionsart in Persian regarding some contextual characteristics.