Perfective

Most Bulgarian verbs can be grouped in perfective-imperfective pairs (imperfective/perfective: идвам/дойда "come", пристигам/пристигна “arrive”).

The TAM ending -nu is the general today past attainative perfective, found with all numbers in the perfective except the singular active, where -ma is found.

Additionally, the perfective form of pherno (used for the subjunctive voice and also for the future tense) is also phero.

Although languages that are described as having imperfective and perfective aspects agree in most cases in their use of these aspects, they may not agree in every situation.

Although the verbs' meaning is similar, in perfective verbs the action is completed and in imperfective verbs it is ongoing.

Classical Irish had a three-way aspectual contrast of simple–perfective–imperfective in the past and present tenses.

Common aspectual distinctions The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is between perfective aspect and imperfective aspect.

Consequently each language contains many pairs of verbs, corresponding to each other in meaning, except that one expresses perfective aspect and the other imperfective.

Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages ; here verbs often occur in the language in pairs, with two related verbs being used respectively for imperfective and perfective meanings.

For example, only some verbs in Georgian behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the perfective (aorist).

French is an example of a language where, as in German, the simple morphological perfective past ( passé simple ) has mostly given way to a compound form ( passé composé ).

In addition to that, past compound forms using participles vary in gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and voice (active and passive) as well as aspect (perfective/aorist and imperfective).

In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了 (perfective), hái 还/還 (still), yǐjīng 已经/已經 (already), and so on.

In Russian and some other languages in the group, perfective verbs have past and future tenses, while imperfective verbs have past, present and future, the imperfective future being a compound tense in most cases.

In the Tyrolean and other Bavarian regiolect the prefix *da can be found, which form perfective aspects.

Languages that lack this aspect (such as Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish) often use the past perfective to render the present perfect (compare the roughly synonymous English sentences "Have you eaten yet?" and "Did you eat yet?").

Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le 了, -zhe 着, zài- 在, and -guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, Li, Charles, and Sandra Thompson (1981).

Most verbs are part of inflected aspect pairs—for example, koupit (perfective) and kupovat (imperfective).

Most verbs come in pairs, with the perfective verb being created out of the imperfective by adding a prefix or making a stem change.

Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him").