20.1: Introduction

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In this final unit of the book we look at the meanings of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and aspect. Tense and aspect markers both contribute information about the time of the event or situation being described. Broadly speaking, tense markers tell us something about the situation’s location in time, as illustrated in (1), while aspect markers tell us something about the situation’s distribution over time, as illustrated in (2).

(1) Lithuanian tense marking (Chung & Timberlake 1985: 204)

a. dirb-au
work-1sg.past
‘I worked/ was working’

b.    dirb-u
       work-1sg.present
       ‘I work/ am working’

c.    dirb-s-iu
       work-future-1sg
       ‘I will work/ will be working’

(2) Aspect marking in English

a. When I got home from the hospital, my wife wrote a letter to my doctor.

b. When I got home from the hospital, my wife was writing a letter to my doctor.

As we will see, many of the same issues that we encountered in our study of word meanings are also relevant to the study of tense and aspect markers: distinguishing entailments from selectional restrictions and other presuppositions; implicature and coercion as sources of new meanings; potential for polysemy and idiomatic senses; etc.

This chapter focuses on aspect, while the next chapter looks at tense. We begin in §20.2 with a discussion of situation type, sometimes referred to assituation aspect or Aktionsart (German for ‘action type’). It turns out that situation type, e.g. the difference between events vs. states, can have a significant effect on the interpretation of both tense and aspect markers.

In §20.3 we introduce the notion of Topic Time, the time under discussion, which will play an important role in our approach to both tense and aspect. §20.4 discusses grammatical aspect, exploring the kinds of aspectual meaning that are most commonly distinguished by grammatical markers across languages. §20.5 and §20.6 explore some of the ways that situation type (Aktionsart) and grammatical aspect interact with each other.