Abstract
Klein (1994) points out that within the treatment of the temporal semantics of English that he proposes, there is no need to maintain the traditional distinction between perfect aspect and anterior tense. An analysis of the semantics of perfect aspect in terms of placing the topic time in the post-time of the event under description can account for the anterior tense readings of the pluperfect as well. In this article, I argue that “Klein’s Conjecture” appears more problematic once extended to other languages, drawing on evidence from Japanese, Kituba, Kalaallisut, Korean, and Yucatec Maya. Languages such as Japanese have expressions of anterior tense that do not fit Klein’s analysis of perfect aspect (topic time after event time), while others—e.g., Yucatec Maya—have expressions that fit Klein’s analysis, but do not have anterior tense readings. The additions to Klein’s theory necessary so it can accommodate the new evidence comprise a revised viewpoint aspect component that distinguishes not only relations between topic and event time, but also relations between topic time and the runtimes of states preceding and following the event in a causal chain, as well as an updated tense module that distinguishes relations between topic time and perspective times in addition to relations between topic time and utterance time.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Throughout this article, I adopt the practice of Comrie (1976) of distinguishing between labels for crosslinguistically identifiable semantic types of tense-aspect operators and language-specific tense-aspect categories by representing the former in lowercase while representing the latter in title case (i.e., with capitalized initial letters).
Cf. also Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (2004, 2007), who propose an LF-based account in which topic time and event time adverbials occupy distinct functional head positions in the syntax. The model compositions I develop in Sects. 2–7 of this article presuppose instead a generic version of non-transformational phrase structure grammar semantically interpreted through type-driven translation into lambda calculus (along the lines of Klein and Sag 1985). Even in such a framework, however, event time adverbials and topic time adverbials will be assumed to enter the semantic composition at distinct stages and thus also to occupy distinct syntactic positions. I take up this matter briefly in Sect. 4. There are approaches to computational semantics that allow syntax to underspecify the order of semantic composition, such as Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake et al. 2005). I assume that it may be possible in such theories to compute the two readings of the first clause of (1)–(2) without treating the clause as syntactically ambiguous.
An anonymous reviewer wonders what role translation plays in this article. The article is not, in fact, based on translation data at all. The Yucatec data come from my own fieldwork on the language over a period of two decades, relying on the analysis of recorded texts and a large battery of elicitation methods. I assume that the same holds true for Fortescue’s Kalaallisut data. The Japanese, Kituba, and Korean data is taken from scholarly work by native speakers.
There are other elements, which I ignore here since they do not directly bear on the subject matter of this article—above all, Klein’s treatment of aktionsart/lexical aspect.
In a somewhat reminiscent fashion, Arche (2013) points to a potential ambiguity or vagueness of the English complex past tenses between interpretations that are distinguished morphologically in Spanish owing to the synthetic aspect inflection of the auxiliaries estar and haber.
It was argued in Sect. 2 that one of the advantages of ‘time-relational’ over ‘mapping’ theories of viewpoint aspect was that the latter, but not the former, blur the distinction between viewpoint aspect and lexical aspect. But how can a separate treatment of viewpoint and lexical aspects as distinct phenomena be reconciled with an analysis of perfect aspects as stative? Mapping theories describe non-perfective viewpoints in terms of mappings from events into events or states. From the perspective of the time-relational theory sketched in this paper, these mappings can be explained in terms of the properties of the part of the eventuality under description or the surrounding causal chain selected for inclusion in the topic situation. Thus, even a verb that is lexically dynamic in terms of the eventuality type it describes only projects a dynamic utterance in combination with perfective (or ingressive or egressive; see Sect. 8) aspects, as only perfectives include the boundaries of an eventuality of the requisite type in topic time and thus assert or question (etc.) the occurrence of change. True perfect aspects are argued in Sect. 5 to be stative, the reason being that they select for inclusion in topic time (and thus for assertion etc.) a result state caused by the eventuality under description. In the same manner, prospective aspects place topic time into overlap with a state preceding the event. Imperfective and progressive aspects are non-dynamic in the sense that, even though they place topic time into a phase of the eventuality during which change may be ongoing, no change in a non-graded property of the theme of the utterance is actually completed during topic time. Thus, the time-relational approach affords explanations for the intuitions underlying the mapping approaches without losing sight of the fundamentally different nature of lexical and viewpoint aspects.
The very large body of literature on perfect aspects distinguishes many different readings; cf. Nishiyama and Koenig (2010) for an overview and some discussion. An important type of reading is the ‘perfect of experience’ or ‘existential interpretation’, illustrated by examples such as Floyd has seen every movie by P. T. Anderson. I assume that this is a special case of a resultative perfect in which the topic time expands to the lifetime of the subject. In contrast, I do not consider the so-called ‘Extended Now Perfect’ (McCoard 1978), as in Floyd has lived in Rochester since 2003, a ‘true’ perfect, i.e., an expression of perfect viewpoint aspect. The Extended-Now Perfect is a special tense-aspect category that involves an imperfective viewpoint and a topic time that overlaps utterance/perspective time and has a specified initial boundary in the past of utterance/perspective time. In English, it is expressed by the Present Perfect of stative verbs and the Perfect Progressive of dynamic verbs. In contrast, in German, a language in which viewpoint aspect is largely not grammaticalized, this notional category is expressed by the Present tense. In Spanish, the two strategies apparently co-occur (María J. Arche, p. c.). And in Yucatec, which is tenseless, this notional category cannot be expressed in a single clause at all. Single clauses represent the past beginnings of current situations or their ongoingness, but not both.
Some, but not all, of these properties also hold for prospective aspects and posterior tenses, respectively. Matters are apparently complicated by the intensional nature of future time reference. For example, prospective aspects, unlike perfects, are apparently compatible with event time specifications; compare I am (now) going to meet you at five vs. I have (now) met you (∗ at five), and see Sect. 5. In this article, I focus on the domain of past time reference in a bid to steer clear of these complications.
Of course, different formats are needed for different types of calendric time specifications, e.g., time of day (‘morning’, ‘evening’, etc.). And the interpretation of calendric adverbials is obviously subject to considerable vagueness.
In the model compositions I present in this article, I assume that event time adverbials combine with the lexical event description, and thus inside the scope of viewpoint aspect operators, whereas topic time adverbials attach outside the scope of aspect markers, but inside the scope of tense markers (a common alternative is of course to left-dislocate topic time adverbials). However, in reality, the relative order in which adverbials and tense and aspect markers enter the semantic composition is far from clear. The evidence from Yucatec and Kalaallisut presented in Sect. 5 suggests that pure perfect aspects are not compatible with event time specifications. This entails that viewpoint aspect markers constrain the compatibility of the event description with time adverbials. They also affect their interpretation; cf. the intensionality of the event time adverbial later in I was going to call you later, but now that you’re here, let’s talk. The implication of these facts, as well as, e.g., the distribution and interpretation of time adverbials in nonfinite clauses/projections, for the ordering of adverbials and functional categories in temporal semantics await in-depth study.
The issue of the range of possible interpretations of the result state of perfect aspects has been debated for decades. See Nishiyama and Koenig (2010) for a recent take.
Strictly speaking, the topic time could also include Bill’s leaving, but extend past utterance time into the future. However, the Future tense of the auxiliary in (12) suggests that the non-deictic relatum lies wholly in the future of utterance time.
As mentioned above, future time reference is different in this respect, since it allows attaching event times to the anticipated or planned (etc.) realization of events. This explains the event time specifications in examples such as I was finishing/going to finish by Monday, but then my hard disk died on me.
The German Preterit and the French Passé Simple appear to be largely restricted to narrative discourses. In conversation, the Present Perfect/Passé Composé are used for past time reference. In contrast, in English, the Present Perfect underextends the domain of perfect aspect, being replaced by the Simple Past in many contexts for reasons that are not clearly understood. For example, as Kratzer (1998) observes, if somebody asks you out of the blue Who built this church? and you respond Borromini built this church, the Simple Past is robustly preferred over the Present Perfect in both question and answer, even though you are discussing the result state of a past building event that holds at utterance time (my thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this observation).
Most of these are adapted from (Cruse 1986:59–61). A different type of ambiguity test capitalizes on anomaly resulting from coordination of different senses when ellipsis or VP anaphora is involved. Arche (2013) applies a test of this kind in support of the analysis that stative clauses in the simple past are ambiguous between perfective and imperfective interpretations in English.
Strictly speaking, function words and inflections are of course a part of the mental lexicon anyway, in that the triplets of phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic information that represent them have to be learned item by item exactly the same way as lexical items.
Key to abbreviations in morpheme glosses: 1/2/3—1st/2nd/3rd person; A—set-A (ergative/possessor) bound pronominal clitic; ACC—accusative; ANT—anterior tense; APP—applicative derivation; ASP—aspect; B—set-B (absolutive) bound pronominal suffix; CAUS—causative derivation; CAUSE—‘becausative’ clause-linkage form; CL—classifier; CMP—completive; CON—connective particle; D2—anaphoric/distal clause-final particle; D3—text-deictic clause-final particle; D4—locative/negative clause-final particle; DEC—declarative; DET—determiner; DUB—dubitative; EMPH—emphatic (negation); ERG—ergative; EXP—expected; GEN—genitive; IN—inanimate; INC—incompletive status; LOC—locative; MOD—‘modalis’ (case); ND—indicative; NEG—negation; NOM—nominative; PAST—past; PERF—perfect; IPL—plural; PLUPERF—PluperfectPOST—posterior tense; PREP—generic (semantically empty) preposition; PRES—present; PRV—perfective; SG—singular; SUBJ—subjunctive status; TE—converb clause-linkage form; TERM—terminative (perfect) aspect;TOP—topic marker; UP—upper bound.
An anonymous reviewer wonders how result states are projected with stative and process verbs. There are no stative verbs in Yucatec. Process and activity verbs occur with ts’o’k mostly under experiential/existential interpretations and to express the state of the relevant process or activity having been completed. Cf. Bohnemeyer (2002) for detailed discussion and Moens (1987) on the (limited) compatibility of activities and processes with the English Perfect.
An anonymous reviewer suggests that the availability of the event as opposed to the result state for anaphoric reference in subsequent discourse might be an additional diagnostic for the distinction between perfect aspects and anterior tenses. This remains to be investigated, although I am skeptical. Based on my experience with Yucatec discourse, I would be very surprised if it turned out not to be possible to continue (27), for example, saying Tu bisahen ka’p’éel semàana ‘It took me two weeks’. The reason for this would appear to be that even though it is only the result state that is asserted or questioned to hold using ts’o’k, this state is still described as a result of an event of the relevant kind having occurred. A ts’o’k clause in fact entails the occurrence of an event of the kind described by the verb. It would not be truthful, for example, to assert (27) if the house had come into existence some way other than by the speaker building it.
The status suffixes combine viewpoint aspect and mood meanings (Bohnemeyer 1998, 2002, 2009, 2012). The incompletive expresses unmarked mood and, when governed by lexical matrix predicates, imperfective aspect. When selected by a preverbal aspect marker such as ts’o’k, however, −ik does not compositionally contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance. The occurrence of −ik with ts’o’k is presumably a reflex of the diachronic relation between ts’o’k and the homophonous aspectual verb meaning ‘end’.
See Bohnemeyer and Swift (2004) on implicature-based aspectual interpretation.
The motion verb ‘go’ is treated in Fig. 9 as introducing an existentially bound path variable h and a function goal that assigns it an endpoint location. I refrain from amending the model theory to reflect these additions since they are not relevant to the topic at hand.
References
Arche, María J. 2013. The construction of viewpoint aspect: the imperfective revisited. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. doi:10.1007/s11049-013-9209-5 (this issue)
Atlas, Jay D., and Stephen C. Levinson. 1981. It-clefts, informativeness and logical form: Radical pragmatics (revised standard version). In Radical pragmatics, ed. Peter Cole, 1–62. New York: Academic Press.
Austin, John Langshaw. 1950. Truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 24(1): 111–129.
Bach, Emmon. 1981. On time, tense, and aspect: An essay in English metaphysics. In Radical pragmatics, ed. Peter Cole, 63–82. New York: Academic Press.
Bartsch, Renate. 1986. On aspectual properties of Dutch and German nominalizations. In Temporal structure in sentence and discourse, eds. Vincenzo Lo Cascio, and Co Vet, 7–39. Dordrecht: Foris.
Bartsch, Renate. 1995. Situations, tense, and aspect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bittner, Maria. 2005. Future discourse in a tenseless language. Journal of Semantics 22: 339–387.
Bittner, Maria. 2008. Aspectual universals of temporal anaphora. In Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, ed. Susan Rothstein, 349–387. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Bittner, Maria. 2009. Tense, mood, and centering. Rutgers University manuscript, http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mbittner/bittner09_tmc.pdf. Accessed 08/01/2013.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen. 1998. Time relations in discourse: Evidence from Yukatek Maya. PhD thesis, Tilburg University.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen. 2002. The grammar of time reference in Yukatek Maya. Munich: LINCOM.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen. 2007. Aspect, temporal anaphora, and tenseless languages: A new Gricean account. Presented at SULA 4: The semantics of under-represented languages in the Americas. Universidade de São Paulo.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen. 2009. Temporal anaphora in a tenseless language. In The expression of time in language, eds. Wolfgang Klein, and Ping Li, 83–128. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen. 2012. In the mood for status: Subjunctive and irrealis in Yucatec. Presented at SULA 7: The semantics of under-represented languages in the Americas. Cornell University.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, and Mary D. Swift. 2004. Event realization and default aspect. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3): 263–296.
Breu, Walter. 1985. Handlungsgrenzen als Grundlage der Verbklassifikation [Action boundaries as the basis of verb classification]. In Slavistische Linguistik 1984 [Slavistic linguistics 1984], ed. Werner Lehfeld, 9–34. Munich: Otto Sagner.
Breu, Walter. 1994. Interactions between lexical, temporal and aspectual meanings. Studies in Language 18: 23–44.
Carlson, Greg N. 1977. Reference to kinds in English. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Chomsky, Noam A. 1971. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. In Semantics, eds. Danny D. Steinberg, and Leon A. Jakobovits, 183–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chung, Sandra, and Alan Timberlake. 1985. Tense, aspect, and mood. In Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. 3 of Grammatical categories and the lexicon, ed. Timothy Shopen, 202–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. On Reichenbach’s approach to tense. In Papers from the seventeenth regional meeting, eds. Roberta A. Hendrick, Carrie S. Masek, and Mary Frances Miller, 24–30. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Comrie, Bernard. 1985. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copestake, Ann, Dan Flickinger, Carl Pollard, and Ivan A. Sag. 2005. Minimal recursion semantics: An introduction. Research on Language and Computation 3: 281–332.
Cover, Rebecca, and Judith Tonhauser. 2014. Semantic theory in the field: Temporal and aspectual reference. In Methodologies in semantic fieldwork, eds. Ryan Bochnak, and Lisa Matthewson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cruse, D. Alan. 1986. Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Declerck, Renaat. 1991. Tense in English. London: Routledge.
Demirdache, Hamida, and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria. 2004. The syntax of time adverbs. In The syntax of time, eds. Jacqueline Guéron, and Alexander Lecarme, 217–234. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Demirdache, Hamida, and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria. 2007. The syntax of time arguments. Lingua 117: 330–366.
Dowty, David R. 1979. Word meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Dowty, David R. 1986. The effects of aspectual class on the temporal structure of discourse: Semantics or pragmatics? Linguistics and Philosophy 9(1): 37–61.
Fortescue, Michael. 1984. West Greenlandic. London: Croom Helm.
Hinrichs, Erhard. 1986. Temporal Anaphora in discourses of English. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 63–82.
Hornstein, Norbert. 1990. As time goes by. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The philosophy of grammar. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Kamp, Hans. 1979. Events, instants, and temporal reference. In Semantics from different points of view, eds. Rainer Bäuerle, Urs Egli, and Arnim von Stechow, 376–418. Berlin: Springer.
Kamp, Hans, and Uwe Reyle. 1993. From discourse to logic. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Kamp, Hans, and Christian Rohrer. 1983. Tense in texts. In Meaning, use, and interpretation of language, eds. Rainer Bäuerle, Christoph Schwartze, and Arnim von Stechow, 250–269. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kamp, Hans, Josef van Genabith, and Uwe Reyle. 2011. Discourse representation theory. In Handbook of philosophical logic, eds. Dov M. Gabbay, and Franz Guenthner. Vol. 15, 125–349. Dordrecht: Springer.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1992. The Present Perfect puzzle. Language 68: 525–552.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1994. Time in language. London: Routledge.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1995. A time-relational analysis of Russian aspect. Language 71: 669–695.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1998. Assertion and finiteness. In Issues in the theory of language acquisition: Essays in honor of Jürgen Weissenborn, eds. Norbert Dittmar, and Zwi Penner, 225–245. Bern: Peter Lang.
Klein, Wolfgang. 2006. On finiteness. In Semantics in acquisition, ed. Veerle Van Geenhoven, 245–272. Dordrecht: Springer.
Klein, Wolfgang. 2009. Finiteness, universal grammar, and the language faculty. In Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, eds. Jiansheng Guo, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Keiko Nakamura, and Seyda Özcaliskan, 333–344. New York: Psychology Press.
Klein, Ewan, and Ivan A. Sag. 1985. Type-driven translation. Linguistics and Philosophy 8: 163–202.
Klein, Wolfgang, Ping Li, and Henriette Hendriks. 2000. Aspect and assertion in mandarin Chinese. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 18: 723–770.
Kratzer, Angelika. 1998. More structural analogies between pronouns and tenses. In Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory VIII, eds. Devon Strolovitch, and Aaron Lawson, 92–110. Ithaca: CLC.
Kratzer, Angelika. 2011. Situations in natural language semantics. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. Edward. N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/situations-semantics/. Last accessed 08/01/2013.
Lee, EunHee. 2010. Pluperfects in Korean and English discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 766–780.
Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lin, Jo-Wang. 2010. A tenseless analysis of mandarin Chinese revisited: A response to Sybesma. Linguistic Inquiry 41(2): 305–329. 2007.
McCawley, James D. 1971. Tense and time reference in English. In Studies in linguistic semantics, eds. Charles J. Fillmore, and D. Terence Langendoen, 96–113. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
McCoard, Robert W. 1978. The English perfect: Tense choice and pragmatic inferences. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Moens, Mark. 1987. Tense, aspect, and temporal reference. Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh.
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1990. Time reference in Kikongo-Kituba. In Pidgin and creole tense-mood-aspect systems, ed. John V. Singler, 97–118. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Nishiyama, Atsuko, and Jean-Pierre Koenig. 2010. What is a perfect state? Language 86: 611–646.
Ogihara, Toshiyuki. 1996. Tense, attitudes and scope. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ogihara, Toshiyuki. 1999. Tense and aspect. In The handbook of Japanese linguistics, ed. Natsuko Tsujimura, 326–348. Oxford: Blackwell.
Partee, Barbara. 1984. Nominal and temporal anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 7: 243–286.
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of symbolic logic. London: Macmillan.
Smith, Carlota S. 1991. The parameter of aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Smith, Carlota S., Ellavina Perkins, and Theodore B. Fernald. 2007. Time in Navajo: Direct and indirect interpretation. International Journal of American Linguistics 73(1): 40–71.
Stowell, Tim. 2007. The syntactic expression of tense. Lingua 117: 437–463.
Swift, Mary D. 2004. Time in child Inuktitut. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sybesma, Rint. 2007. Whether we tense-agree overtly or not. Linguistic Inquiry 38(3): 580–587.
ter Meulen, Alice G. B. 1995. Representing time in natural language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Tonhauser, Judith. 2007. Nominal tense? The meaning of Guaraní nominal temporal markers. Language 83(4): 831–869.
Trondhjem, N. Frederikke. 2009. Marking of past time in Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language. In Variations on polysynthesis: The Eskaleut languages, eds. Marc-Antoine Mahieu, and Nicole Tersis, 171–182. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review LXVI: 143–160.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at SULA 2—The Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas at the University of British Columbia in 2003. I would like to thank the audience, the members of the former Event Representation project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the members of the Semantic Typology Lab at the University at Buffalo for comments and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Sotaro Kita, Wolfgang Klein, Eunhee Lee, Steve Levinson, Aron Marvel, Doug Roland, Mitsuaki Shimojo, Mary Swift, Tim Tilbe, Randi Tucker, and the Yucatec consultants who contributed to the paper. I am indebted to the editor of the special issue, María J. Arche, for extensive comments and for her initiative and leadership in putting the issue together. Three anonymous reviewers provided me with invaluable criticism, which in my view helped make the paper much stronger. As a matter of course, the views presented here are my own and any mistakes are my responsibility alone. The research on Yucatec reported on in Sect. 5 was partly supported by the Max Planck Society.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bohnemeyer, J. Aspect vs. relative tense: the case reopened. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 917–954 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9210-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9210-z