Board Thread:Linguistics/@comment-5643714-20131104161029/@comment-2040889-20131107180439

Seeing as nobody's responded, I'll try and tackle this. Well, the basic concept is that tense shows when the action happens while aspect describes the nature of the time of the action; it shows if the action is beginning, ending, happening over a stretch of time or instantaneously, spread out over intervals or in an unbroken stretch. If Wikipedia told you the frequentative is a lexical aspect, it lied to you: aspects can be either lexical or morphologically-realised, yes, but this isn't determined by the aspect itself but rather by the language. It's also very rare to find a language that expresses its aspects solely through lexical or morphological means; Slavic languages, which are very good examples, distinguish between the perfective and imperfective in almost every single verb and verbs can rarely be both - the aspects are both lexical and morphological, and verbs that are of one aspect can, with a thousand different prefixes and suffixes that each carry their own separate connotations, be turned into verbs of the other aspect. As for the aorist and preterite and whatnot, they are more like tense-aspect compound terms and they mean different things when applied to different languages; a Slavic aorist isn't the same as the Greek one