Aspectual Verbs in Balinese

Aspect refers to completion and incompletion of the event encoded by verbs. Languages express aspectual meanings in different ways. English, for instant, conveys these meanings syntactically through the use of auxiliary ‘have and past participle’ for perfective aspect, and ‘be and verb in –ing’ for progressive aspect. Balinese encoded aspectual meaning lexically that is through the use of aspectual verbs. This article is aimed at analysing aspectual verbs in Balinese. The theory adopted in analysing the Balinese aspectual verbs is the theory of aspect by Givon (1984). This study was descriptive qualitative and the data source was in the form of Balinese short stories and intuitive data. The data was collected through note-taking and the findings showed that the Balinese aspectual verbs expressed the completion and incompletion of the events encoded in the following verbs at the time axis.