This study presents a semantic framework for analysing all aspectual constructions in terms of the event state distinction, and describes the grammatical expression of aspectual meaning in terms of a theory of grammatical constructions. In this theory, grammatical constructions, like words, are conventionalized form-meaning pairs, which are best described not only with respect to their intrinsic semantic values, but also with respect to the functional oppositions in which they participate.

This Handbook is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that current form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas.

This comprehensive examination of tense and grammatical aspect provides fascinating insight into how languages indicate distinctions of time. Providing an in-depth survey of the scholarship from the ancient Greeks through the 1980s, Time and the Verb explains and evaluates every major issue and theory, concentrating on familiar Classical and modern European languages. An invaluable reference tool as well as a major contribution to the history of linguistic sciences, this book will be the standard against which future work on tense and aspect is measured.

This open access book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal reference and its linguistic expression, from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics approach. Verbal tenses, in general, and more specifically the categories of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal coherence of a discourse, as well as to the cognitive temporal coherence of the mental representations built in the language comprehension process. As such, it investigates the phenomenon of temporal reference at the interface between corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics and pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing and machine translation.

Situated within the long-established domain of temporality research in Second Language Acquisition, this book aims to provide an update on recent research directions in the field through a range of papers which explore relatively new territory. Those areas include the expression of modality and counterfactuality, the effect of first language transfer, aspectuo-temporal comprehension, aspectuo-temporal marking at a wider discursive level, and methodological issues in the study of the acquisition of aspect. The studies presented explore English and French as second languages, involving both child and adult learners from a range of first language backgrounds in both instructed and naturalistic learning contexts. The studies draw on both spoken and written data which explore various facets of the learners’ second language comprehension and production. The volume offers new, but complementary insights to previous research, as well as pointing to directions for future research in this burgeoning field of study.

Linguists and philosophers examine the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between facts, events, states, propositions, and utterances. They link this to current research in psychology and anthropology.

This volume links Cognitive Grammar explanations to the area of second-language learning and instructed grammar teaching. It represents a contribution to empirically based knowledge promoting a new perspective on the process of teaching and learning about English language structures. The theoretical part of the book provides an overview of the basic tenets of Cognitive Grammar, and discusses elements of the theory that are of crucial importance for understanding English tense and aspect structures. The second part brings together these two fields of study and tests a Cognitive Grammar approach to teaching tense and aspect to less advanced learners of English. To this end, an experimental study was conducted, comparing the effects of Cognitive Grammar-inspired instruction on the language learning process with those of teaching methods which employ more traditional grammatical descriptions. As such, the book is of particular relevance to Cognitive Grammar research, and second-language learning and teaching research, and for learners and teachers of a foreign language.