Abstract

The present paper deals with grammatical categories and their formalization as morphological units on the example of aspectuality / temporality on the one hand, and aspect / tense on the other hand with special attention paid to Polish, German, English and Romanic languages such as Italian, French and Spanish. It could be shown that the formal realization of aspectuality cannot be considered as being restricted to aspects, but also comprises tense in languages which are deprived of aspects. Furthermore the author proves that the German system of past tenses semantically largely differ from its English binary counterpart which it is often wrongly equated with.