ON THE IMPERFECTIVE AND PERFECTIVE ASPECT IN ESTONIAN AND LATVIAN.

This article presents a brief overview and comparison of the imperfective and perfective aspect in Estonian and Latvian. The main means of expressing the perfective and imperfective aspect in Estonian are the case opposition of the direct object (the nominative/genitive or the partitive), the use of verb particles, and the general context. In Latvian, the opposition of the perfective and imperfective aspect is mainly expressed by existence or absence of verb prefixes, adverbs, and also the context. In Latvian, verb prefixes, besides perfectivity, may also add or modify the lexical meaning of the verb. We compare how the perfective and imperfective aspect are expressed in both languages in the case of transitive verbs, based on the correspondences found in a text corpus of literary works and their translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]