Tense and aspect

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...

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.

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.

2001

Languages

Variation across languages has always fascinated linguists, but in the past, cross-linguistic variation has mostly been investigated in form-related subdisciplines (phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax) [...]

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.

2012

when discussing theories of the perfect. In section 3, we investigate in more detail theories of the perfect focusing on semantic characteristics, bearing in mind that most of the discussions have revolved around perfects in European languages (Germanic and Romance). In section 4, we discuss accounts of how pragmatic factors and discourse relations aff ect the use of the perfect, and in section 5, we conclude by examining the place of a perfect in a tense/aspect system more generally, considering how it relates to categories such as the resultative and the simple past, and also to the habitual and the prospective.

American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures, 1999

The theoretical aim of this book, indicated by its subtitle, is to elucidate the interface between semantic interpretation and morphosyntactic structure. Its empirical domain, indicated by the title, would appear to be ideally suited to this goal. Tense and aspect are well-studied semantic categories, but ones in which there are still plenty of puzzles. It is reasonable to think that an improved understanding may come about through detailed study of the

Language, 2001