...verbs'
They have been referred to by various names: aspectual verbs, aspect markers, aspectual auxiliaries, verbal extensions, post-verbs, intensive verbs, etc.
...(LT)
Most examples given here are from Spoken Tamil rather than LT, but many are quoted from their LT versions given elsewhere.
...historically
One can either treat the notion of being `derived' from something else as historical or as a process of derivational morphology. Typically native and missionary grammarians have dealt with aspectual verbs as if they were special or idiosyncratic usages of lexical verbs, rather than being semantically and synchronically different.
...(AVP)
AVP is an abbreviation for `adverbial participle' a form of the verb that is essentially its past stem minus person-number-gender (PNG) markers; it expresses in ordinary syntax the notion that some verbal action preceded another verbal action, that expressed by the next verb in the sentence. A sentence may have only one finite verb; all other verb must be non-finite, such as the adverbial participle, the infinitive, or some other.
.../koreen/,
The short /o/ in many forms of this morpheme is actually phonetically [], i.e. /koreen/ is [k re], etc. The phonology of the spoken form of this AV is much more different from its LT counterpart than could be predicted by regular rules, and moreover varies tremendously from dialect to dialect; in some dialects there is a present form /kidreen/ and infinitive /kida/ that are back formations from the past /kittu. The extreme variability of the phonology of this AV bespeaks a radical departure of some sort that may be part of the grammaticalization process.
...action.
E. Annamalai refers to this verb as `ego-benefactive.' Many of the examples of aspect (which he refers to as verbal extension), are taken from his 1985 book on the subject.
...`wearing'.
Although some would say this is self-benefactive and/or completive: `put on and keep on.'
...dialect.
The attitudinal aspectual verbs are not a closed set, and different dialects may use different verbs as markers of aspectual and attitudinal nuances. The non-attitudinal aspectual verbs are a closed set and show less variation from dialect to dialect. But there are some differences between Literary and Spoken Tamil, even in this set.
...utility'.
Annamalai calls this the verb of anticipated consequence.'
...ST.
This aspectual verb is often erroneously translated as English `used to', e.g. `Many kings used to rule at that time,' whereas `used to' probably ought to be reserved for translating habitual actions, which /vaa/ does not express.
...syntactic.
Evidence for this comes from the operation of phonological rules that seem to require that aspect be word-internal (Schiffman forthcoming).

Harold Schiffman
Fri Feb 9 10:54:13 EST 1996