Grammatical, lexical-grammatical,lexical, contextual and prosodic means in Modern English are part of the aspectual conceptual category, consisting of marked and unmarked members of the opposition. In the present article we would like to analyze some minor aspectual means existing in English, with occasional examples concerning Romanian and some other European languages. Diachronically the dominant categorial forms can become subservient to more competitive means. In Early
English lexical and contextual means ceded the priority to the perfective-imperfective
opposition, which in its turn is now subservient to the taxonomy of continuous – non -
continuous aspect. In the Romance languages the durative forms have mainly a stylistic aspectual function. The same tendency in the use of continuous aspect in the
English language.
