Originally Posted by bad manners
Hmm, last time I checked, "tense" was the standard way of referring to English verb paradigms. Some researched use the German names, especially when comparing English with the other Germanic languages, but "aspect" seems to be used only functionally, to say things like "The perfect tenses are ambivalent with regards to the perfective aspect; in a number of highly frequent patterns, no perfect tense can be used to communicate a perfective aspect, whilst certain perfect tense paradigms are imperfective". :-) Great stuff, but hardly explains what those perfect tenses are.