Aspect of the English Simple Forms

영어 단순형의 상

The simple forms in English have mostly been investigated in terms of tense, especially by those who do not distinguish between tense and aspect in English. However, we often find some usages of the simple forms that do not seem to fit in any of the meanings of tense. The purpose of this paper is to find aspectual meanings out of the simple present and past forms by re-analyzing their meanings in terms of aspect. It turns out that they represent the perfective aspect seeing a situation as a whole with no beginning. middle and end. As for the controversial stative situations in the simple forms, they have been proven to show the perfective aspect, too, if we agree to see both the part and whole in state as having the same features. And syntactic evidences from the simple forms and their corresponding progressive forms compared also show that the habitual dynamic situations represent the same aspect in the simple forms.