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The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages

Astrid De Wit author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:20th Oct '16

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The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages cover

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.

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 promiseA 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 *

ISBN: 9780198759539

Dimensions: 239mm x 162mm x 19mm

Weight: 494g

236 pages