It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence.
Author(s): Saussure, Louis de, Moeschler, Jacques
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 253
Frontmatter
......Page 1
Table of contents......Page 7
Introduction......Page 9
Modals, emotives, and modal subordination......Page 19
The past and perfect of epistemic modals......Page 55
Aspectual composition in idioms......Page 79
A modified ExtendedNow for the present perfect......Page 97
The passé simple / imparfait of French vs the simple past / past progressive of English......Page 117
Sequence of perfect......Page 131
Temporal and aspectual variation in ARIs......Page 155
Economy constraints on temporal subordination......Page 177
Future time reference: Truth-conditional pragmatics or semantics of acts of communication?......Page 201
When the Present is all in the Past......Page 217
Reference time without tense......Page 237
Backmatter
......Page 259
