Foundational Readings in Tense and Aspect
Linguistics 7430
Fall 2007
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These books and articles on this list are good introductory
readings in the subject area, most of which require relatively little
background in syntactic and semantic theory. Starred readings are
especially appropriate as introductory works.
*Bickel, Balthasar. 1997. Aspectual Scope and the
Difference between Logical and Semantic Representation. Lingua 102: 115-31. [This paper is
relatively subtle, but it is also clearly argued and well written, and
I use it to introduce aspect in LING 5430.]
*Binnick, Robert. 1991. Time and the
Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. [This is a comprehensive introduction to the data that inform
theories of tense and aspect; it covers both ancient and modern
theories of tense and aspect. Chapters 2 and 6 give overviews of,
respectively, the categories that tense encodes and the categories that
aspect encodes. Other chapters cover modern theories of tense and
aspect: Chapter 3 covers 2 covers modern theories of subordinate tenses
and Chapter 7 covers formal semantic theories of aspect.]
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect,
and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. [This is a book about grammaticalization in the
domain of aspect. Focus on Chapters 1, 5-7]
*Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Comrie, Bernard. 1985. Tense.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herweg, Michael. 1991. A Critical Examination of Two Classical
Approaches to Aspect. Journal of
Semantics 8: 363-402. [This paper introduces some theories of
aspect based on formal semantics; despite its formal sophistication, it
is quite transparent and readable.]
Michaelis, Laura. 1998. Aspectual
Grammar and Past-Time Reference. London: Routledge. [especially
Introduction and Chapter 1]
Michaelis, Laura. 2004. Type Shifting in Construction Grammar: an
Integrated Approach To Aspectual Coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15: 1-67.
[This is a long paper, but it is of potential interest to those who
like syntax, since it relates aspect to a theory of syntax based on
grammatical constructions.]
*Moens, Marc and Mark Steedman. 1988. Temporal Ontology
and Temporal Reference. Computational
Linguistics 14: 15-28. [Despite the computational focus of
this paper, it is highly accessible, and it introduces aspectual
type-shifting in a transparent way.]
Smith, Carlota S. The Parameter of
Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer. [especially Chapters 1-5]