Tense, aspect and temporal order: before and after

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.

In: Johan van Benthem & Alice ter Meulen, Handbook of Logic and Language. 2nd Edition, Elsevier: Amsterdam, Boston, etc. Chapter 22, 975-988., 2011

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.

2002

Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1988

An analysis of English tense and aspect is presented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two "hypothetical" times: the perfect time (when a sentence contains perfect aspect) and the progressive or during time. A method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements in the sentence is also described.

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...

2008

Embedded tenses pose a challenge to any semantic theory of temporal discourse. In this paper I propose an intensional account of English embedded tenses. On the account that I will present, the semantic job of a tense is to specify a relation between a perspective time and the time at which an eventuality takes place. By default, the time of utterance is the perspective time that a tense takes as input. But a switch of perspective time can be triggered when a tense appears in certain grammatical environments. I suggest that intensional verbs and modals are triggers of perspective-time shifts.