Mental aspects

The experiential aspect emphasizes the idea that a person has had the experience of doing something at least once prior to the time mentioned. There is more to the experiential aspect than the dry fact that something happened; the subject of an experiential verb is almost always a being which is capable of ‘having an experience.’ English doesn’t have a single distinct marker for this aspect, so we turn to Mandarin Chinese for examples; the experiential is marked by the suffix -guo in the neutral tone: ni chi-le yúchì méi-you ‘did you eat the shark’s fin?’ versus ni chi-guo yúchì méi-you ‘have you ever eaten (ever had the experience of eating) shark’s fin?’, likewise wo méi qù hen duo guójia ‘I did not visit many countries (during a certain trip or period of time)’ versus wo méi qùguo hen duo guójia ‘I haven’t visited (have never had the experience of visiting) many countries.’

Indicating that action is performed in an intentional manner might be classified as an aspect, although some might call it a modality. Adding the intentional aspect to the verb “to see” produces a word that means roughly the same thing as “to look at,” and adding the intentional to the concept “be aware of” produces the concept “pay attention to.”

The counterpart of the intentional is, of course, the unintentional or accidental. If we start with a verb that means “to hold something in one’s hand,” add the cessative marker to create a verb meaning “cease to hold,” and then add the unintentional marker, we now have a verb that roughly equals the English expression “to drop or let go of something (accidentally).” Similarly, if our artificial language has a verb meaning “to be in a sitting position,” we can add the inceptive aspect marker to create a verb meaning “to begin to sit,” and then we can add the unintentional aspect marker to create a word that corresponds to the English phrase “to (accidentally) fall on one’s butt, to fall on your arse.”

Tamil has an aspectual verb (vai, ve-) which indicates an aspect of future utility. Its meaning is something like “doing X for future use” or “considering the future consequences of the action.” Here are two examples:⁶ tanniirek kuticcu veppoom, ‘we will tank up on water, i.e. we will drink a lot of water now in order to avoid being thirsty in the near future’; pooliiskitte edeyaavadu olari vekkaadee ‘don’t go blabbing things to the police (because doing so might get you into even more trouble later).’

Aspects indicating distribution

The distributive aspect indicates that an action occurs in a “one-after-another” manner. An example, from Russian: on zaper vse dveri ‘he locked all the doors’ (non-distributive) versus on pozapiral vse dveri ‘he locked all the doors individually, one by one.’

Alternation (doing X, then doing Y, then X, then Y and so forth – or two agents taking turns performing an action) could also be treated as a quasi-aspect in the design of a new language.

The generic aspect occurs in broad, general statements such as “squirrels live in trees.” Old Vorlin’s suffix -ur, which usually marked nouns that indicate a broad concept as opposed to a specific example of the concept, could also be used as a verb infix to mark the generic aspect: ful foburo hom, ‘birds (generally) fear humans.’ The generic aspect is called the “universal tense” in some language descriptions.