Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Tending toward perfection.
- adj. Grammar Of, related to, or being the aspect that expresses the completion or the result of the action denoted by the verb.
- n. Grammar The perfective aspect.
- n. Grammar A perfective verb form.
- n. Grammar A verb having a perfective form.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Tending or conducing to perfecting or perfection.
- In grammar, expressing completed or perfected action, as a verb.
Wiktionary
- adj. grammar of, or relative to the perfect tense or perfective aspect.
- adj. obsolete Tending to make perfect, or to bring to perfection.
- n. grammar a perfective verb form
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Tending or conducing to make perfect, or to bring to perfection; -- usually followed by
of .
WordNet 3.0
- n. a tense of verbs used in describing action that has been completed (sometimes regarded as perfective aspect)
- n. the aspect of a verb that expresses a completed action
Examples
“The perfective is the ordinary style of an honest narrative.”
“But the common run of fiction in the Soviet magazines continues as it was, and it is to be feared that there is something intrinsically opposed to the "perfective" narrative in the constitution of the contemporary Russian novelist.”
“The issue at hand is not the generation of human life, but the protecting of human life, the good of the personhood of neither the parents nor the child is violated with HET and it is completely compatible with the love and respect for every good that is perfective of the human person.”
“There is a distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs but I found that not too mind-bending (or at least easier than the nouns and adjectives).”
“Thus, a piece of fiction usually begins with an imperfective verb by way of introduction (“I was sleeping”); then, shifting into a perfective verb, the narrative launches into the plot (“I woke”).”
Simon & Schuster: The Metamorphosis, in The Penal Colony,and Other Stories
“In an English narrative, the action, the bare bones of the plot, are rendered with the perfective tenses, while the background is filled in with imperfective tenses.”
Simon & Schuster: The Metamorphosis, in The Penal Colony,and Other Stories
“Both the non-continuous and punctive would be expressed in Mandarin with the perfective particle le 了 placed after the verb.”
“I notice that le is often mistaken by foreigners like me as a past tense marker, yet it's more accurately described as a marker of completion for both action and state, refered to as a perfective or completive.”
“Rather, the marker *-s- specifies a specific event of an inherently dynamic verb a perfective nuance and this is why only some verbs were given a sigmatic aorist later on in non-Anatolian dialects.”
“All this being said, we then understand why the perfective action could not possibly have been originally marked by *-i as proven by non-Anatolian dialects if its function were originally to express this aspect, due to the obvious semantic contradictions that would ensue, and we also see why the sigmatic aorist couldn't have ever applied to all verbs, such as punctives, likewise to avoid simple contradiction.”
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