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Chapter 25 - Tense and Aspect in Germanic Languages

from Part IV - Semantics and Pragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

By
Kristin Melum Eide
Edited by
Michael T. Putnam  and
B. Richard Page
Michael T. Putnam
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
B. Richard Page
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

Many natural languages signal via designated grammatical markers the time when a predicated event takes or took place; in the past, the present, or the future. Such designated markers are for instance particular inflections (affixes), particles, or auxiliaries, usually elements with an affinity to the verbal domain. Exponents serving to locate a situation in time, especially relative to the moment of utterance or the speech event, are described as tense markers. Likewise, languages often encode the internal constituency of events and states, distinguishing a dynamic action from a stative one; denoting whether or not an action is bounded or unbounded, completed, or if it repeats itself. These features of an event are usually described as their aspect. Tense and aspect interact in intricate ways cross-linguistically and have been subjected to scrutiny by several generations of grammarians. This chapter examines some seminal assumptions and descriptions of these notions with a particular view to Germanic languages.

Keywords

deixistense affixestense particlesstateseventssimple and complex tensesfinite and nonfinite tensesperiphrastic tensesabsolute and relative tense
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics , pp. 591 - 614
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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