Abstract
Tense is traditionally assumed to express temporal relations between the time of the event and the moment of speech, whereas aspect expresses various views on one and the same event. In Klein (1994), it was argued that the intuitions which underlie this viewing metaphor can be made precise by a time-relational analysis as well. In his article “Aspect vs. relative tense: the case reopened”, Jürgen Bohnemeyer challenges one important point of this analysis, the equation of aspect and relative tense in the English perfect and in temporal forms of few other languages. In the present comment, it is argued that this is indeed a simplification, which does not speak, however, against a time-relational analysis of aspect in general. The main lines of such an analysis for the English perfect are sketched. It is shown that it naturally accounts for differences between the simple past and the present perfect, as well as for the oddity of constructions such as Einstein has visited Princeton or Ira has left yesterday at five.
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Notes
‘Permanently, the tradition slides between fact and observer.’
Throughout most of this paper, I adopt Comrie’s (1985) label situation as an overarching term for all sorts of eventualities, and accordingly time of situation. Since this might lead to confusion at the end, where intervals with more complex internal temporal structures than usually assumed are introduced, I will switch to “event time”, put in quotation marks.
TT may also precede TSIT, a case which is not grammaticised in English (and apparently not in many other languages, either).
This sentence is possible, though, with the reading that the window remained open for five minutes.
It would be tempting to extend this discussion to many other significant contributions that were made over the years to the analysis of this issue. But that would be far beyond the commentary that this paper is intended to be.
I should add, however, that my reaction, when I first read Bohnemeyer’s 1998 dissertation on Yukatec (see Bohnemeyer, 2002), can best described by Moore’s paradox: It is surely true, but I do not believe it.
I do not mean, of course, that this is an exhaustive description of what English to leave means. The crucial point is that there must be two subintervals with mutually exclusive properties, in this case, local properties.
As an aside: this is to my mind the reason why it is odd to specify the compound interval by a duration adverbial like for five minutes. That is possible only if the adverbial can be applied to a subinterval; in English, this seems only possible for the time at which the window is open.
As of now, I avoid the label TSIT in order to avoid confusion with its earlier and simpler usage; but there is no real contradiction to that usage—it is just a refinement by looking at the internal structure of different verb types.
A more systematic analysis that also includes the temporal properties of participle formation is found in Klein (2010).
Speakers do not seem to have very clear intuitions about whether an initial adverbial is in a similar way dependent on intonation; it seems however, that the topic time reading is strongly preferred independent of the intonational pattern.
Imagine a psi-experiment in which Ira is supposed to open a window by telekinesis. Then, he might still try when the eyewitnesses already have shouted that he did it.
The title of Irwin Shaw’s story God was here, but he left early strongly evokes the idea that God is absent at the utterance time. But the assertion made by the sentence is not incompatible with the idea that he has returned in the meantime. In that regard, the pure anterior tense is in no way different from the perfect God has left early.
This is also reflected in the traditional idea of a special current relevance that goes with the present perfect but not with the simple past. I do not think, incidentally, that distinctions like the one between “universal perfect” and “existential perfect” are specific to the perfect; they can be made with the same right for the simple past.
Note that the subject position in English typically has topic status; that means that topic entity and topic time go hand in hand; they are two components of the entire topic situation.
Under an extended-now analysis of the present perfect, as advocated by a number of scholars, it is sometimes argued that the thus “extended now” clashes with the past time adverbial. That may be true, but it does not change the fact that the event is in the past, and the mere existence of an interval that ranges from the utterance time back into the past does not change this fact.
It is possible to make assertions like At the time of Fibonacci, 1 was a prime number—meaning: in those days, it was considered to be a prime number, whereas nowadays, we do not consider it to be a prime number. But in that sense, it is indeed not a permanent property of 1 to be a prime number.
Nor is it duration-definite, i.e., the marking had simply leaves open how long the topic time is.
References
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Klein, W. Is aspect time-relational? Commentary on the paper by Jürgen Bohnemeyer. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 955–971 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9240-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9240-1