Realization of Perfective Aspect in Urdu: Structural Elements and Meaning Contribution

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive account of how perfective aspect is realized in Urdu, focusing on the structural elements that convey perfectivity and their meaning. Grammatical aspects represent the temporal structure of situations and can be categorized as perfective or imperfective. Perfective aspect conveys a sense of closure or culmination, while imperfective aspect indicates continuity within a situation. The meaning of perfective forms varies across languages, and this paper discusses the realization of perfective aspect with respect to different types of situations. In contrast to English, where perfective predicates consistently convey a sense of completion across all types of situations, Urdu past participles do not always convey this meaning, particularly in dynamic situations with natural endpoints that require a compound verb combination. In Urdu, perfectivity is expressed through a combination of a main verb and a light verb that encodes the perfective aspectual value and additional information about how the situation occurred. Unlike aspectual auxiliaries, Urdu light verbs have an indexing function that links the situation expressed in the perfective predicate to another situation. Additionally, this paper illustrates how light verbs in Urdu add a stative meaning component to perfective predicates, which distinguishes them from English perfective predicates.