Interesting way of expressing tense/aspect distinctions.

I've thought of the following way of expressing tense and aspect. It seems
a pretty interesting way of doing it, and might be something a loglanger
might like, although I hope that it's not too loglangy to be found in a
naturalistic language - perhaps somebody can find a real example.

Basically, rather than being marked for tense and aspect in the usual way,
the verb is marked for inception and termination. The inception marker
(probably a prefix) indicates when the action begins, and the termination
marker (probably a suffix) indicates when it ends. The possible values for
each of them might be distant past, immediate past, present, immediate
future and distant future, with the possibility of a null value for
"unspecified". This all maps out much the same semantic space as tense and
aspect, but divides it up in a slightly different way.

Pete

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