In her project Pretérito Imperfeito de Territórios Móveis (The Past Imperfective of Mobile Territories)—inspired by her own family photo albums she manipulates photos posted on social networking sites to create a series of ghostly yearbook-style photos.
One of the reviewers suggests that the differences in interpretation are due to the ambiguity of the construction between a perfect past and an imperfective reading.
The verb is inflected for mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), aspect (perfective, imperfective), voice (active, passive), tense (present, past), and person (first, second, and third, singular and plural).
Most Nahuatl dialects distinguish three tenses: present, past, and future, and two aspects: perfective and imperfective.
Aspect is the contrast between latent or ongoing (grammaticalised as imperfective) and actualized or complete (grammaticalised as perfective); tense is deictic time, past, present or future by reference to the here-&-now.
In the Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic, there are two contrasting sets of affixes, the first associated with the past perfective form of the stem and the second with the nonpast imperfective stem.
When thinking about a negative past event, people should be sadder when they describe it using the imperfective aspect (which brings them mentally nearer to it) than when using the perfective aspect.
So, when thinking about a positive past event, people should be happier when they describe it using the imperfective aspect (which brings them mentally closer to it) than when using the perfective aspect.
Imperfective verbs need an auxiliary to make their future tense.
The modern language has seven noun cases, two numbers, three persons in the verb, three tenses (present, past, and future), two voices, and three moods (indicative, imperative, and conditional or subjunctive), and it marks verbs for perfective (completed action) and imperfective (action in process or uncompleted action) aspects.
The Proto-Indo-European verb had three aspects: imperfective, perfective, and stative.
