GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL ASPECT IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN: A CONTRASTIVE LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

The paper presents a contrastive literature review of the grammatical and lexical aspect in English and Serbian. The motivation behind choosing this subject matter was found in the inconsistency that led scholars to class linguistic phenomena related to the grammatical and lexical features of verbs in the same category. Namely, the category of grammatical aspect was approached in different ways for a long time, various meanings were attributed to this category, and new terminology was introduced so as to describe language phenomena related to this grammatical category in a more detailed way. This resulted in the study of the lexical aspect as a subcategory of the grammatical aspect. Therefore, the primary goal of this review paper is to gain insight into the current tendencies related to the grammatical and lexical aspect, as well as to provide a systematic presentation of the approaches to the grammatical and lexical aspect in relevant English and Serbian literature and grammar books. The research revealed that the category of lexical aspect was often studied within the category of grammatical aspect due to its distinctive features stativity, dynamicity, punctuality, and durativity, which make it similar to the category of grammatical aspect. However, contemporary authors in both languages make a clear distinction between these two categories, emphasizing that grammatical aspect is a grammatical and a subjective category because it is expressed by verbal inflectional morphology and periphrases and because it reflects the speaker’s viewpoint on a situation, whereas lexical aspect is expressed by the verb meaning and verbal derivational morphology, thus being considered an objective category.