Editing Grammatical aspect (section)

==Lexical vis-à-vis grammatical aspect==
{{Main|Lexical aspect}}
There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and [[lexical aspect]]. Other terms for the contrast ''lexical vs. grammatical'' include: ''situation vs. viewpoint'' and ''inner vs. outer''.<ref>MacDonald, Jonathan Eric. (2006). ''The Syntax of Inner Aspect (Doctoral dissertation)'' (p. 1). Stony Brook University.</ref><ref>Kiyota, Masaru. (2008). ''Situation aspect and viewpoint aspect: From Salish to Japanese (Doctoral dissertation)''. University of British Columbia.</ref> Lexical aspect, also known as '''Aktionsart''', is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect. Typical distinctions are between states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a picture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or [[semelfactive]], events ("I sneezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used in English with a prepositional ''for''-phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called ''[[Lexical aspect|Aktionsart]]'', especially by German and [[Slavist|Slavic]] linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in [[Athabaskan languages]].

One of the factors in situation aspect is [[telicity]]. Telicity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb ''phrase''. Achievements, accomplishments and [[semelfactive]]s have telic situation aspect, while states and activities have atelic situation aspect.

The other factor in situation aspect is duration, which is also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments, states, and activities have duration, while achievements and semelfactives do not.