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  • Chapter 25 - Tense and Aspect in Germanic Languages

  • from Part IV - Semantics and Pragmatics
  • Edited by Michael T. Putnam, Pennsylvania State University, B. Richard Page, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics
    Published online:
    31 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020, pp 591-614

  • 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.