Aspect

Example:

When talking about safety procedures at your workplace, you are not saying that your work is actually about security, but you are talking about the safety aspect of your work. The safety aspect summarizes all procedures and guidelines only related to the specific topic of security and safety in your work.

In computer science, an aspect is part of a program that cross-cuts its core concerns, therefore violating its Separation of concerns. I.e. it is needed to complete the program, but not necessarily specific to the domain the program is written for. Isolating such aspects as logging and persistence from business logic is the aim of the aspect-oriented programming paradigm.

Another possible view is, that every major feature of the program, core concern (business logic) or cross-cutting concern (additional features), is an aspect, and by weaving them together, you finally produce a whole out of the separate aspects.

The prism analogy describes aspects with terms from the domain of light. Like you split light into its many aspects (different colors) with a prism, you split a problem into its separate aspects. With another prism you can put the different colors back into a white ray of light, and by the process of weaving aspects you can put your solutions for the different aspects of a problem back into a solution for the whole problem.

In linguistics, aspect refers to a feature of the verb having to do with the temporal flow of the described event or state. The typical contrasts of aspect in many languages can be shown using phrases in English. Here are some of the many aspects found in the world's languages:

• Habitual: 'I walk home from work.' (every day)
• Perfect: 'I have/had gone to the cinema.'
• Imperfect: 'I went to the cinema.'
• Imperfective: 'I'm going home.' (the action is in progress)
• Perfective: 'I went home.' (the action is finished)
• Progressive: 'I am eating.'
• Prospective: 'I am about to eat.'
• Inceptive: 'I am beginning to eat.'
• Continuative: 'I am continuing to eat.'
• Terminative: 'I am finishing my meal.'
• Inchoative: 'My nose is turning red.' (from the cold)
• Cessative: 'I am quitting smoking.'
• Pausative: 'I stopped working for a while.'
• Resumptive: 'I resumed sleeping.'
• Punctual: 'I slept.
• Durative: 'I slept for an hour.'
• Delimitative: 'I slept for a bit.'
• Protractive: 'The argument went on and on.'
• Iterative: 'I read the same books again and again.'
• Frequentative: 'I go to school a lot.'
• Experiential: 'I have gone to school many times.'
• Intentional: 'I listened carefully.'
• Accidental: 'I knocked over the chair.'
• Generic: 'Mangoes grow on trees.'
• Intensive: 'It glared.'
• Moderative: 'It shined.'
• Attenuative: 'It glimmered.'

In some languages, such as Russian, aspect is more salient than tense in narrative. Russian, like others, marks aspect using special morphology on the verb instead of periphrasis (auxiliaries, adverbs, etc.) as in English. Arabic shows a contrast between dynamic and static aspect (the concepts 'ride' and 'mount' are shown by the same verb, rukubun, static in the former case and dynamic in the latter).

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