Aspectual Form

The purpose of assignment two was to find two examples in our specific text (either fiction, poetry, or news print) which contain lines that house progressive and perfect verb aspects. Upon finding these examples, we were to label their tense, which I found out can be quite difficult.

Our class discussion group broke down each of our individual pieces and discovered similarities between our genre, in our case, fiction. Both of these aspects, mated with different tenses, can greatly change the diversity of the contents text created by an author.

The two examples I contributed to class were both from the novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. This piece is well known to house a seemingly endless number of literary styles, tense shifts, and character interactions; so naturally, the piece should contain a number of examples that could have been useful for my project.

One of the main characteristics of fiction writing is that the text is supposed to carry, develop, and produce a story. By utilizing different verbal aspects, the author can broaden the effect of his or her story. The following paragraph will display and define the two examples I used in my class presentation.

"You haven't even learned the on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable."-Present Perfect aspect

"...the brown liquid tearing along, carrying him helpless... seems he's been tumbling ass over teakettle..."- Present Perfect-Progressive

The main purpose of verb aspect is to show completion or possible ongoing action. By exercising different variations of verb aspect and tense, one can liven up there piece and accentuate parts that might otherwise feel incomplete and bland.

For example, the second sentence containing both perfect and progressive aspect livens up its respective portion of the book. This stage of the book is seeing a lot destruction going on. A man is seen floating through the streets in a river of slime. Even though a majority of detail is omitted in my sample, one can still gather the severity of the situation thanks to the aspect of the verb. Having both perfect and progressive aspects, you can see that this gentleman has been wading through a river of filth for quite sometime, and more then likely, the event will continue into the future. The perfect aspect does its job by solidifying an action. For instance, using the perfect

...