 The natural language categories tense and aspect   embody the linguistic encoding of time. From a typological point of view these categories are typical verbal  categories.[2]  This means that if these categories are morphologically realized in a language then these morphemes attach to the verb. Verbs usually express events, processes, actions or  states[3]  and the temporal morphemes locate these eventualities in time. Of course this does not mean that languages that lack such morphemes are not able to express temporal relations. They just have to choose other means for this purpose. One famous example of a language not containing temporal morphology is Mandarin Chinese. Often tense and aspect cannot be clearly separated. For example the Quiché prefix \(x-\) denotes a completed (aspect) action in the past  (tense).[4] 