TENSE AND ASPECT IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

Abstract

This article conducts an examination of tense and aspect systems found in English and German which belong to the  same Germanic language family yet exhibit substantial differences in the way they represent temporal and aspectual concepts. Both  languages employ distinct present and past tense markers through their grammatical structure and employ auxiliary verbs to indicate future events  but differ in how they handle aspectual distinctions: English employs grammatical aspectual distinctions through its progressive and  perfect forms while German mostly uses contextual information and complex expressions. Using data from BNC and DWDS, the method performs an analysis about frequency and functional distribution of tense-aspect forms in 1,000-sentence samples drawn from each language. Findings show that English tends to use aspectual forms, particularly the progressive, with more or less equal frequency, whereas German prefers present and perfect with less employment of constructions that could be considered progressive. This is one of the crucial differences that make translating from one language to another challenging, also the difficulty in distinguishing aspectual nuances between these two languages. Thus, this study emphasizes the typological opposition between those languages that have grammatical aspect and those that require discourse-based temporal interpretation, providing insights for pedagogy, translation, and further cross-linguistic studies.