The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect

Athens Journal of Philology, 2020

The present perfect is a mystery and most linguists agree that its definitions are inadequate. The paper deals with two major issues: (i) what is its second meaning, beside the temporal one; (ii) what is its raison d'être? Is it the expression of notions such as current relevance or resultativeness? The analysis is based on recent findings that the present perfect performs a grammaticalizing function with certain sentences belonging to a semantico-syntactic schema in two languages, Bulgarian and Montenegrin. It shows that, as regards (i), the present perfect is a form that can be termed non-witnessed in itself in Bulgarian and English. However, while in English and Montenegrin it is not grammatically marked as non-witnessed (in Bulgarian it is), in English and Bulgarian it signals this value-but not by default. Conversely, the indefinite past in English, to which the present perfect is invariably contrasted, is a witnessed form by default, hence its witnessed value can be canceled in a sentence/context. In other words, the English indefinite past is not grammatically marked as witnessed and does not signify this value-but signals it by default. As regards (ii), the raison d'être of the English present perfect is argued to be the signaling (not by default) of the value non-witnessed to counterbalance the default value witnessed in the indefinite past. Bottom line: the raison d'être of the present perfect across languages appears to be found not in its "meaning" but in certain functions related to language structure that it performs.

Lingua, 2007

I propose an output constraint that filters syntactic structures at the interface between syntax and semantics. This constraint requires the situation the sentence describes to be construed as located at a point of time included within an interval of time directly or indirectly defined by the speech act. A universal syntactic T(ense)-Chain places a situation at a point of time, linking the Reference time associated with the Complementizer node to the Event time associated with the Tense node. In Logical Form, the situation which vP describes is predicated of the point of time which T denotes. It is less straightforward, however, to place an event within an interval of time. To do this, the event time morpheme in T must merge with an aspect morpheme. I propose that aspect has nothing to do with the internal structure of events, as is often assumed. Rather, aspect pluralizes the point of time T denotes, deriving a series of points, or interval, of time. In Ancient or Modern Greek, both tense and aspect are realised as grammatical morphemes affixed to the verb. But other languages lack either perfective or imperfective aspect morphemes, or both. English, for example, lacks imperfective aspect while French lacks perfective aspect. A grammar with defective aspect must develop compensatory mechanisms which allow it to satisfy the output constraint on temporal interpretation mentioned above. English grammaticalized the possessive lexical verb HAVE, deriving an imperfective auxiliary verb. French and other languages raise a perfect participle from a lower syntactic domain to the higher, tense, domain where it functions as a perfective temporal form defining a bounded time interval in T. I argue that if the same verb can be construed as either lexical or grammatical, like English HAVE, or the same grammatical suffix can be construed as either an aktionsart morpheme which bounds an event or as an aspect morpheme which bounds a tense interval, like the French participial suffix, it is because the sentence structure is divided into two syntactic domains, vP and TP/CP, associated with distinct semantic construals.

1974

Journal of Pragmatics, 2014

The paper investigates the connection between past tense and modality in six Romance and Germanic languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, English and German). I first argue for an aspecto-temporal definition of imperfects and preterits based on the notion of 'reference point' (R) and I suggest that the different interpretations of past tenses (including the modal ones) reflect specific instantiations of R as 'topic time', 'aspectual vantage point' or 'epistemic evaluation'. Second, I offer a classification and analysis of the modal uses of the imperfects and preterits observed in the languages under investigation. Finally, I expand on the idea that the modal interpretations of past tenses correspond to pragmatic inferences that are being conventionalised and mirror the stages of 'bridging contexts' and 'switch contexts' described in Heine's (2002) model for semantic change. T

Linguistics, 2003

This review is devoted to the bulk of Giorgi and Pianesi's (1997) proposal for the (morpho-)syntax and semantics of tense and aspect, presented in chapters 1-4 of their book. The authors investigate the cross-linguistic variation in the semantics of various tense forms (Present, Imperfect, Present Perfect) and claim that it can be directly linked to their morphosyntactic properties, expressed in terms of an explicit theory of functional features and projections. In our critical discussion we contend that (a) the treatment of aspect is deficient (in particular, we criticize the unified analysis of the different usages of the Italian Present Perfect); (b) the treatment of actionalitythat is, Aktionsart-phenomena is occasionally misconceived; (c) the syntactic treatment of the ''P-definiteness constraint'' (Klein 1992) presents some technical problems. On these grounds, we put forward two more general remarks. The first one concerns the assumption that there is a strict correspondence between the morphological exponence of specific inflectional features and tenseaspect semantics. We believe instead that the three levels of semantics, syntax, and morphology must be assumed to be partially independent, although related in a nonarbitrary way. Second, we suggest that G&P have failed to take into account the discourse function of tenses. Although a formal syntactic analysis of tense and aspect is obviously relevant, tense and aspect are intrinsically ''interface phenomena,'' where the syntactic configurations yielded by the computational system crucially interact with the independent constraints of other external systems.

Linguistics, 2003

This review is devoted to the bulk of Giorgi and Pianesi's (1997) proposal for the (morpho-)syntax and semantics of tense and aspect, presented in chapters 1-4 of their book. The authors investigate the cross-linguistic variation in the semantics of various tense forms (Present, Imperfect, Present Perfect) and claim that it can be directly linked to their morphosyntactic properties, expressed in terms of an explicit theory of functional features and projections.

Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2001

Synthese, 1979

A highly desirable goal in grammatical description, considering the extraordinary diversity of natural languages, is the development of a consistent and robust system of conceptual tools and (if possible) terminological conventions, such that typological comparison may easily be pursued. This is even more the case in the domain of tense and aspect, notoriously haunted by a conspicuous variety of theoretical approaches. In this review-article, devoted to the discussion of three recent works, I would like to address the problem of how a grammatical description of tense and aspect structures should be conceived in order to make it interlinguistically useful. This would considerably improve the situation in our task of constructing a general typology of tense and aspect systems; a task that should best be tackled before too late, i. e. before most of the languages still spoken on this planet lose their speakers and remain frozen for ever at the status of written record. Since we are eng...