Perfective and imperfective aspect in Hungarian: (Invisible) differences

The paper argues for the universality of the grammatical aspectual categories perfective and imperfective. They are shown to be present even in languages such as Hungarian, where they allow variable interpretations of events. In Hungarian, grammatical aspect can be detected only by its restriction on the distribution of particles. Quantized, perfective aspect allows all particles. Cumulative, imperfective aspect disallows those particles that delimit the event and impose a quantized interpretation. This approach derives the distribution of several particle types, based on their effect on aspectual properties.