The Facets of Aspect: A Comparative Study of Hungarian and Italian Systems Part II: Analysis of Italian; Bridging Aspect: Comparison of Italian and Hungarian with Practical Implications for Language Acquisition

Abstract

This paper, the second part of a comparative study on aspect in Hungarian and Italian, adopts a Cognitive-Functional and typological perspective to analyze the Italian aspectual system and its relation to the Hungarian one. Integrating insights from prototype theory and usage-based linguistics, it explores how both languages encode the conceptual categories of completeness and continuity through distinct grammatical strategies, synthetic and inflectional in Italian, analytic and constructional in Hungarian. The study highlights the cognitive and pedagogical implications of these typological contrasts for second language acquisition, proposing a contrastive approach that fosters learners’ metalinguistic awareness and conceptual flexibility in understanding and expressing aspectual distinctions.