Amharic has two kinds of verb form aspectuals– the well-known (canonical) aspectuals such as the perfective and imperfective, and less known verb form aspectuals such as the iterative, repetitive etc,. The canonical aspects are the forms that are available across the whole Semitic linguistic family. They are expressed by a templatic morphology. The second class of aspectual forms, however, appear to be specific to this language. They are explicitly morphologically marked like in European languages; either as prefixes or by particles.
In this paper, I will look at the relationship between these two classes of aspectual forms, and their impact on the agreement morphology. I will point out that the traditional aspectual classifications implemented in Semitic languages are not sufficient to fully explicate the verbal aspects of Amharic. The existence of some specific verbal aspects such as prospective and retrospective aspects that havn't been recognized in the rest of the Semitic literature. Secondly, I want to demonstrate that some of the verbal aspects that have been encoded as root-pattern paradigm in other Semitic languages, such as the imperfective, have grammaticalized to prefixes in Amharic.