The Aspect WG meets weekly to read and critically discuss current, scientific texts, which focus on the category of Aspect. The WG was founded by Dr. Barbara Schmiedtová. The other participants are currently five doctoral students who are writing their dissertations at the IDF and are advised by Dr. Schmiedtová.
All participants speak a Slavic language natively. The following languages are represented: Bulgarian, Polish, Russian and Czech. The WG studies the means temporal-aspectual expression in German in comparison to each of the Slavic languages. The verbal category of aspect plays a prominent role here, as it is fully grammaticalized in the Slavic languages, but does not exist in German.
These different studies use an empirical methodology and psycholinguistic techniques. Large amounts of language production and perception data are collected. In addition to this data, the WG researches language usage principles in the area of tense and aspect, using various linguistically directed questionnaires.