3.3. Aspect
Aspect as an inflectional notion that refers to marking a verb with a morpheme that expresses the way the internal temporal organization of actions, events, states and processes is perceived. A major categorization of such organization is between the presentation of events as incompleted vs. completed, which roughly correspond to imperfective aspect and perfective aspect respectively. These categories also have sub-categories as described below. It is crucial to note that the aspectual information of an event is independent of its time, namely, an event can, for example, be presented as ongoing not only in the present as in the English example “I am writing a text message right now.” but also in the past as in “I was writing a text message (when he walked in the door)”.
Some aspectual notions are expressed with lexical aspectual markers [Lexicon - 3.3.2.]. However, a number of aspectual notions are expressed either with modifying the verb form such as its movement or with non-manual morphemes such as mouth gestures or both.