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.
This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality
and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with
incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language
understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers
(originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses,
aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and
theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and
non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of
phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include
the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in
Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings
of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French
imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival
perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on
temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of
present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin
and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students
in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax)
as well as philosophy and logic.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9783110198768
Publisert
2015
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
De Gruyter
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter