While tense concerns the temporal positioning of clauses in absolute terms or relative to one another and has a deictic function, aspect denotes a non-deictic temporal perspective on the activity structure of events. Aspect is conventionally subdivided into a category relating to grammatical constructions with aspectual characteristics (progressive or durative aspect characterising a construction, as in (2a) below), and Aktionsart, dealing with the aspectual characteristics of specific verbs (e.g. inchoative aspect characterising the verb begin begin, as in (2b) below).

Aspect is also expressed by means of adverbs and adverbial phrases. Thus a proposition merely expressing past tense becomes resultative through the addition of al, klaar, al klaar or reeds already:

In what follows, the main focus will be on the aspectual properties of constructions, but in the section on Constructions with aspectual characteristics the lexical aspect inherent in particular verbs plays an important part in determining the aspectual value of constructions.

Durative (or progressive) aspect refers to continued action over a shorter or longer period of time. While the present tense is not specially marked for durative aspect, a sentence such as (4a) may be interpreted as durative. The construction in (4b) is employed increasingly in Afrikaans to express durative aspect. In (4c) and (4d) durativity is expressed by means of nominalised verbs (werk work; ry 'drive') and (4e) makes use of one of a small set of postural verbs used to express durative aspect.

The present tense passive, with word become as auxiliary, is – unlike the perfect passive with be as auxiliary – particularly dynamic and strongly implies durative aspect:

The present tense is also employed to express habitual action:

A number of constructions are inchoative (or ingressive) in nature, i.e. they refer to the first phase or beginning of an action:

Terminative (or resultative) constructions refer to the last or end phase of an event, e.g.

Reduplication may, inter alia, express iterative (or repetitive) aspect, as in (9a), or durative aspect, as in (9b). Reduplicated verbs mirror repeated action through their diagrammatic iconicity, in other words the repeated verbal sign signals repetition in the real world. This type of iconicity is known as 'diagrammatic' as the words do not constitute a sound or other direct image of the referent, but rather picture the referent through their morpho-syntactic structure (cf. Conradie 2003). Reduplication is therefore an appropriate vehicle for the expression of iterative aspect. In as far as the perspective of repeated actions easily merges into that of an extended period of uninterrupted action, reduplication can also be a vehicle of durative aspect.

aspect entails reference to more than one point in time: the time when an event took place in the past, on the one hand, and the time of the situation following on or resulting from the event in the past, on the other. In contrast to a past action or state of affairs which need bear no relationship to the time of the utterance, anteriority suggests a past action which has continued relevance in the present, so that the causative link between two points in time is not severed. The only Afrikaans construction expressing anteriority in this sense is a residual mutative or unaccusative construction of Dutch provenance consisting of the auxiliary verb be and a directional adverbial, but in Afrikaans with obligatory ellipsis of the past participle gegaan gone. Anteriority is fully expressed in (10a), where a past event maintains its relevance at the moment of speaking. In (10b) only the past event is singled out.

Additional aspectual types to be discussed, are habitual (see section titled Aspectual functions of tense forms) and pre-inchoative aspect (see section titled Constructions with aspectual characteristics).

Constructions differ in the way they are related to aspect. While aspect may only be a subsidiary or secondary function of a given construction, it might be the main function of another. Aspectual functions are further discussed under the following headings:

• Aspectual functions of tense forms
• Constructions with explicit aspectual function
• Constructions with aspectual potential
• Constructions with aspectual characteristics.