Whereas tense expresses time in reference to the moment of speaking, grammatical aspect deals with internal organization of events or states relative to the speaker. Two types of aspect are generally distinguished: grammatical aspect and lexical or situation aspect. In contrast to grammatical aspect, lexical aspect deals with aspectual information that is an inherent feature of the predicate.
This section deals with grammatical aspect in DGS. In general, DGS marks grammatical aspect by changing movement properties of the verb sign, by nonmanual markers or by adding free morphemes such as adverbials or auxiliaries.