Inchoative aspect (abbreviated inch or incho) is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of an action or state.[1][2] It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages. It should not be confused with the prospective[3], which denotes actions that are about to start. The English language can approximate the inchoative aspect through the verbs "to start" or "to get" combined with a gerund. Some linguists prefer to use the term "inchoative aspect" to indicate change of state, and use the term ingressive aspect to indicate the starting of an action.
Since inchoative is a grammatical aspect and not a tense, it can be combined with tenses to form present inchoative, past inchoative and future inchoative, all used in Lithuanian. In Russian, inchoatives are regularly derived from unidirectional imperfective verbs of motion by adding the prefix по-, e.g. бежать - побежать: "to run" - "to start running". Also cf. шли (normal past tense plural of идти - "to go") vs. "Пошли!" meaning approximately "Let's get going!". Certain other verbs can be marked for the inchoative aspect with the prefix за- (e.g. он засмеялся "he started laughing", он заплакал "he started crying"). In Latin, the inchoative aspect was marked with the suffix -sc- ("amo" - I love, "amasco" - I'm starting to love, I'm falling in love; "florere" - to flower, "florescere" - to start flowering, etc.).
The term inchoative verb is used by generative grammarians to refer to a class of verbs that reflect a change of state; e. g., "John aged" or "The fog cleared". This usage bears little or no relationship to the aspectual usage described above.
According to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, in shaping the semantics of the verbal system of Modern Hebrew (which he terms "Israeli"), Yiddish has systematized Israeli inchoativity, which denotes the beginning of an action (an inceptive). While Israeli shakháv "was lying down (3rd person, masculine, singular)" is neutral, Israeli nishkáv "lay down, started being lain down (3rd person, masculine, singular)" is inchoative. Many Israeli inchoative forms are new and did not exist in Hebrew. The verb-templates chosen to host these forms are the ones possessing prefixes: niXXáX and hitXaXéX.
Zuckermann suggests that it is not that the niXXáX and hitXaXéX verb-templates were chosen to host the inchoative forms because the Yiddish inchoative forms usually have a prefix (consider Yiddish avékleygn zikh "lie down" and avékshteln zikh "stand up", as opposed to the neutral Yiddish lígn "be lying down"). Rather, since the non-inchoative forms are semantically unmarked, the verb-template hosting them is the unmarked XaXáX. Consequently, other verb-templates — which happen to include "prefixes" — host the inchoative forms, thus making the inchoative aspect in Israeli systematic.
According to Zuckermann, "whilst Yiddish also indicates inchoativity by the use of the reflexive zikh or of vern 'become', Israeli opted to grammaticalize this notion using its existing system of verb-templates, in this case two intransitive verb-templates: passive niXXáX and reflexive, reciprocal hitXaXéX. In other words, Yiddish introduced a clear-cut semantic-grammatical distinction in Israeli between inchoative and non-inchoative, using the pre-existent inventory of Hebrew forms."[4]
Furthermore, "the Yiddish impact may also be seen in the presence of analytic neutral (noninchoative) verbs which have developed — due to analogy — from inchoative forms, for example hayá malé ‘was full (masculine)’, hayá zakén ‘was old (masculine)’, and hayá nirgásh ‘was excited (masculine)’. Note also that often the Yiddish contribution has resulted in the increased use of a pre-existent inchoative Hebrew form."[4]
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