The present interest in verbal aspect is largely due to the research of the Slavicists of the last century. Although many other languages (IE or not) have something which bears a strong resemblance to the categories of punctual, iterative, and durative as they appear in the Slavic languages, there are but few in which such a distinction is so clearly a part of the grammatical, nonlexical structure. Nevertheless, Slavic verb aspect has attracted the attention of some linguists to comparable semantic categories in other languages. This concept has been particularly fruitful for IE linguistics. In PIE the aspectual meanings are most particularly expressed by verbal themes, i.e. elements between the root and the ending; this process is described by Meillet and Vendryes (Traité de grammaire comparée §257) as expressing ‘les modalités de la durée, suivant que l'on considère le procès dans un point ou dans l'ensemble de son développement, dans son début ou dans son terme, suivant qu'on le suppose inachevé ou achevé, limité à lui-même ou prolongé sans un résultat, etc.‘