The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages (Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought) - Hardcover

De Wit, Astrid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198759533 ISBN 13: 9780198759539

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

This book presents an analysis of how speakers of typologically diverse languages report present-time situations. It begins from the assumption that there is a restriction on the use of the present tense to report present-time dynamic/perfective situations, while with stative/imperfective situations there are no such alignment problems. Astrid De Wit brings together cross-linguistic observations from English, French, the English-based creole language Sranan, and various Slavic languages, and relates them to the same phenomenon, the 'present perfective paradox'. The proposed analysis is founded on the assumption that there is an epistemic alignment constraint preventing the identification and reporting of events in their entirety at the time of speaking. This book discusses the various strategies that the aforementioned languages have developed to resolve this conceptual difficulty, and demonstrates that many of the features of their tense-aspect systems can be regarded as the result of this conflict resolution. It also offers cognitively plausible explanations for the conceptual structures underlying the interactions attested between tense and aspect.

About this title

About the Author

Astrid De Wit holds a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Antwerp (2014). She spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles under a grant from the National Fund for Scientific Research. She has published widely on tense, aspect, and modality in a variety of languages, and her work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Studies in Language, and Journal of Germanic Linguistics.

Review

"De Wit has managed to something remarkable,which is to construct a comparative analysis of an underexamined issue of tense and aspect that has typological promiseâA great merit of this study is that the analysis manages to take each language (family) on its own terms, instead of focusing on subsets of the relevant data and reductivist generalizations...With regard to its theoretical potential, her development of a cognitive-linguistic epistemic approach to aspectual semantics is a welcome departure from the traditional approach of relying almost entirely on configurations on the timeline" -- Stephen M. Dickey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Folia Linguistica

"This typological focus demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of the book. It isrecommended for anyone interested in temporality and crosslinguistic semantics." -- Daniel Altshuler, Hampshire College and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Language

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0198759533
• ISBN 13: 9780198759539
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 236