Inchoative aspect (

abbreviated An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing per ...

or ), also known as inceptive, is a

grammatical aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference t ...

, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

such as

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

and Lithuanian, and also in

Finnic languages The Finnic or Baltic Finnic languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 million speakers, who live mainly in Finland and Estonia. Traditionally, ...

or European derived languages with high percentage of Latin-based words like

Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...

. It should not be confused with the prospective, which denotes actions that are about to start. The English language can approximate the inchoative aspect through the verbs "to become" or "to get" combined with an adjective. Since inchoative is a grammatical aspect and not a tense, it can be combined with tenses to form past inchoative, frequentative past inchoative and future inchoative, all used in Lithuanian. In

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

, inchoatives are regularly derived from unidirectional imperfective verbs of motion by adding the prefix , e.g. , : "to run", "to start running". Also compare (normal past tense plural of , "to go") with meaning approximately "Let's get going!". Certain other verbs can be marked for the inchoative aspect with the prefix (e.g. , "he started laughing", "he started crying"). Similar behavior is observed in Ukrainian, and in other

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto- ...

. In Latin, the inchoative aspect was marked with the infix : : , I love; , I'm starting to love, I'm falling in love : , to flower, , to start flowering In

, any verb is made inchoative by the prefix : : , : "to dance", "to start dancing" The term

inchoative verb An inchoative verb, sometimes called an "inceptive" verb, shows a process of beginning or becoming. Productive inchoative affixes exist in several languages, including the suffixes present in Latin and Ancient Greek, and consequently some Romance ...

is used by

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

ians to refer to a class of verbs that reflect a change of state; e. g., "John aged" or "The fog cleared". This usage bears little or no relationship to the aspectual usage described above.

References

{{Grammatical aspects Grammatical aspects Latin grammar Russian grammar Ukrainian grammar Lithuanian grammar