Perfective Aspect - Perfective Vs. Perfect

Perfective Vs. Perfect

The terms perfective and perfect are unfortunately confused or interchanged in many grammatical descriptions. A perfect is a grammatical form used to describe what is variously described as a past event with present relevance, or a present state resulting from a past situation. For example, "I have come to the cinema" implies both that I went to the cinema and that I am now in the cinema; "I have been to France" conveys that I've had that experience; and "I have lost my wallet" implies that this loss is troublesome at the present moment.

As English has a perfect, the distinction can be illustrated with the simple past standing in for the perfective. A perfect construction like "I've eaten" conveys the continued significance of that action, with implications such as "I'm full" or "you've missed dinner" depending on context. As such, it is ungrammatical to assign it a time in the past, such as "I've eaten yesterday". A perfective construction, however, has no such inherent implication of continued relevance, and as such "I ate yesterday" is perfectly grammatical; indeed, in languages which have a perfective, that is precisely the aspect which is used for such simple past events.

Traditional Greek grammar uses the term perfect in its modern sense. This was opposed to the aorist (past perfective in modern terms), which describes a unitary past action, and the imperfect (past imperfective), describing an ongoing past action. Latin, however, lost the distinction between perfective (aorist) and perfect, and for morphological reasons the single form covering both uses was called the "perfect". The two-way Latin distinction between imperfect and perfect carried over into the terminology of various modern languages, such as Slavic and the Romance languages, which have an aspectual distinction between imperfective and perfective. Here the word "imperfect" continues for the past imperfective, and the term "preterite" may be used for past perfective in contrast to the perfect.

Because of the common confusion of the terms perfect and perfective, various authors have tried to replace one or the other. Some use the Greek term 'aorist' for perfective, though this has the problem that it is commonly understood to mean specifically the past perfective. Others have replaced the perfect with anterior, though this can be ambiguous for those familiar with languages which have a true anterior tense. More unambiguous is replacing 'perfect' with retrospective or resultative.