Two-phase verbs: a crosslinguistic look at an actional class

Abstract This paper documents the properties and realizations of the actional (aspectual, Aktionsart) class of two-phase verbs, with a particular focus on languages with inflectional (obligatory) grammatical aspect. The paper adopts a descriptive (non-formal) and typological perspective. Two-phase verbs are defined, for the purposes of the paper, as verbs whose inflectional (obligatory) aspect grams (e.g., imperfective, progressive, etc.) can express both the durative phase of the situation leading up to the culmination, as well as the durative phase resulting from that culmination. The realizations of the class in perfective-imperfective languages are compared to realizations in two languages with idiosyncratic aspect systems, Belhare and Nyakyusa.