inchoative

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Inchoative aspect (abbreviated INCH or INCHO) is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of an action or state.^[1][2] It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages. It should not be confused with the prospective^[3], which denotes actions that are about to start. The English language can approximate the inchoative aspect through the verbs "to start" or "to get" combined with a gerund. Some linguists prefer to use the term "inchoative aspect" to indicate change of state, and use the term ingressive aspect to indicate the starting of an action.

Since inchoative is a grammatical aspect and not a tense, it can be combined with tenses to form present inchoative, past inchoative and future inchoative, all used in Lithuanian. In Russian, inchoatives are regularly derived from unidirectional imperfective verbs of motion by adding the prefix по-, e.g. бежать - побежать: "to run" - "to start running". Also cf. шли (normal past tense plural of идти - "to go") vs. "Пошли!" meaning approximately "Let's get going!". Certain other verbs can be marked for the inchoative aspect with the prefix за- (e.g. он засмеялся "he started laughing", он заплакал "he started crying"). In Latin, the inchoative aspect was marked with the suffix -sc- ("amo" - I love, "amasco" - I'm starting to love, I'm falling in love; "florere" - to flower, "florescere" - to start flowering, etc.).

The term inchoative verb is used by generative grammarians to refer to a class of verbs that reflect a change of state; e. g., "John aged" or "The fog cleared". This usage bears little or no relationship to the aspectual usage described above.

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