Capturing simultaneity: a commentary on the paper by Hamida Demirdache and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria

Abstract

How does grammar represent simultaneity? More precisely, how do grammatical representations of sentences indicate that two events or situations are located at the same time? This is a question of central importance for the theory of tense and aspect, and one to which Hamida Demirdache and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (Nat. Lang. Linguist. Theory, doi:10.1007/s11049-014-9231-2, 2014) (D&UE) propose some provocative new answers. Their empirical focus is the semantics of perfective, imperfective, and progressive aspect in French and Spanish, with special attention to the temporal semantics of modal verbs, but their account has broader implications for the theory of simultaneous time reference and the imperfective/perfective distinction in general.

In these remarks, I discuss certain implications of their main proposal and its implementation. Specifically, I examine their idea that the principal semantic distinction between perfective and imperfective viewpoint aspect involves a contrast between coreference or covaluation (with perfective aspect) and semantic binding (with imperfective aspect). D&UE assume that the perfective/imperfective contrast is aspectual, and structurally parallel to perfect and progressive aspect; they implement the coreference versus binding distinction in terms of the relation between two aspectual time coordinates (the Assertion Time and the Event Time). I point out some problems that arise under these assumptions, and propose an alternative implementation of the coreference versus binding distinction at the higher level of tense. I then explore empirical implications of this approach for perfective versus imperfective tenses in ellipsis contexts, involving strict versus sloppy identity in temporal reference.