Imperfective aspect

The imperfective (abbreviated IPFV or more ambiguously IMPV) is a grammatical aspect used to
describe a situation viewed with interior composition. The imperfective is used in language to describe
ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past,
present, or future. Although many languages have a general imperfective, others have distinct aspects
for one or more of its various roles, such as progressive, habitual, and iterative aspects.

English

English is an example of a language with no general imperfective. The English progressive is used to
describe ongoing events such as "The rain was beating down". Habitual situations do not have their
own verb form (in most dialects), but the construction "used to" conveys past habitual action, as in I
used to ski. Unlike in languages with a general imperfective, in English the simple past tense can be
used for situations presented as ongoing, such as The rain beat down continuously through the night.

A contrast between the progressive and imperfective is seen with stative verbs. In English stative
verbs, such as know, do not use the progressive (*I was knowing is ungrammatical), while in
languages with an imperfective, stative verbs frequently appear in the imperfective.

Imperfective and perfective

The opposite aspect is the perfective (in Ancient Greek, generally called the aorist), which views a
situation as a simple whole, without interior composition. (This is not the same as the perfect.) Unlike
most other tense–aspect category oppositions, it is typical for a language not to choose either
perfective or imperfective as being generally marked and the other as being generally unmarked

In narrative, one of the uses of the imperfective is to set the background scene ("It was midnight. The
room was dark. The rain was beating down. Water was streaming in through a broken window. A gun
lay on the table."), with the perfective describing foregrounded actions within that scene ("Suddenly, a
man burst into the room, ran over to the table, and grabbed the gun.").

English does not have these aspects. However, the background-action contrast provides a decent
approximation in English:

"John was reading when I entered."

Here 'entered' presents "the totality of the situation referred to [...]: the whole of the situation is
presented as a single unanalysable whole, with beginning, middle, and end all rolled into one; no
attempt is made to divide this situation up into the various individual phases that make up the action of
entry."This is the essence of the perfective aspect: an event presented as an unanalyzed whole.

'Was reading', however, is different. Besides being the background to 'entered', the form 'reading'
presents "an internal portion of John's reading, [with] no explicit reference to the beginning or to the
end of his reading.This is the essence of the imperfective aspect. Or, to continue the quotation, "the
perfective looks at the situation from the outside, without necessarily distinguishing any of the internal
structure of the situation, whereas the imperfective looks at the situation from inside, and as such is
crucially concerned with the internal structure of the situation, since it can both look backwards
towards the start of the situation, and look forwards to the end of the situation, and indeed it is equally
appropriate if the situation is one that lasts through all time, without any beginning and without any
end."

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This is why, within the past tense, perfective verbs are typically translated into English as simple past,
like 'entered', whereas imperfective verbs are typically translated as 'was reading', 'used to read', and
the like. (In English, it is easiest to illustrate aspect in the past tense. However, any tense is possible:
Present "John is reading as I enter", future "John will be reading when I enter", etc.: In each tense, the
aspectual distinction is the same.)

This aspectual distinction is not inherent to the events themselves, but is decided by how the speaker
views them or wishes to present them. The very same event may be described as perfective in one
clause, and then imperfective in the next. For example,

"John read that book yesterday; while he was reading it, the postman came,"

where the two forms of 'to read' refer to the same thing. In 'John read that book yesterday', however,
John's reading is presented as a complete event, without further subdivision into successive temporal
phases; while in 'while he was reading it', this event is opened up, so that the speaker is now in the
middle of the situation of John's reading, as it is in the middle of this reading that the postman arrives

The perfective and imperfective need not occur together in the same utterance; indeed they more often
do not. However, it is difficult to describe them in English without an explicit contrast like "John was
reading when I entered."

Combination of imperfective and perfective

The two aspects may be combined on the same verb in a few languages, for perfective imperfectives
and imperfective perfectives. Georgian and Bulgarian, for example, have parallel perfective-
imperfective and aorist-imperfect forms, the latter restricted to the past tense. In Bulgarian, there are
parallel perfective and imperfective stems; aorist and imperfect suffixes are typically added to the
perfective and imperfective stems, respectively, but the opposite can occur. For example, an imperfect
perfective is used in Bulgarian for a simple action that is repeated or habitual

vecher sedn-eshe na chardak-a

evening sit.PFV-PST.IPFV on verandah-DEF
In the evening he would sit down on the verandah.

Here each sitting is an unanalyzed whole, a simple event, so the perfective root of the verb sedn 'sat' is
used. However, the clause as a whole describes an on-going event conceived of as having internal
structure, so the imperfective suffix -eshe is added. Without the suffix, the clause would read simply as
In the evening he sat on the verandah.