Aspect in English and Mugali Rai: A Contrastive Study
Keywords:
aspect, past progressive, present progressive, past perfect, present perfectAbstract
The paper attempts to explore the aspect system in Mugali Rai, spoken in Dhankuta district of Nepal by a very few people firstly and compares and contrasts Mugali Rai aspect system with that of English aspect system secondly. There are only two aspects in Mugali Rai, namely perfect and progressive. Perfect aspect can be categorised into past perfect and present perfect in terms of time dimensions. Similarly, progressive aspect is also categorised into past progressive and present progressive from time dimensions. All types of aspects in Mugali Rai are morphologicall marked. On the contrary, aspect system in English is not only morphologicall marked. There are several complex construction using have+past participle, be+present participle and have+been+present participle for perfect, progressive and perfect progressive respectively. Mugali Rai has only four structures for aspect whereas English has 17 different types of aspectual strutures describe in examples 24 to 40. They are really challenging job for Mugali Rai learners to conceptualise these different structures. Finally, this paper finds out EFL problems and suggests some pedagogical strategies while teaching and learning English aspect system as a foreign langauge to Mugali Rai learners.
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