Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
- Series page
- The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Part I Background
- Part II Modern generative approaches to the study of sentence structure
- Part III Syntactic structures
- Part IV Syntactic processes: their nature, locality, and motivation
- Part V Syntax and the internal interfaces
- 19 Ellipsis phenomena
- 20 Tense, aspect, and modality
- 21 Negationand negativepolarity
- 22 The syntax of scopeand quantification
- 23 Syntax, information structure,and prosody
- Part VI Syntax and the external interfaces
- References
- Index of language names
- Index
20 - Tense, aspect, and modality
from Part V - Syntax and the internal interfaces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
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Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
- Series page
- The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Part I Background
- Part II Modern generative approaches to the study of sentence structure
- Part III Syntactic structures
- Part IV Syntactic processes: their nature, locality, and motivation
- Part V Syntax and the internal interfaces
- 19 Ellipsis phenomena
- 20 Tense, aspect, and modality
- 21 Negationand negativepolarity
- 22 The syntax of scopeand quantification
- 23 Syntax, information structure,and prosody
- Part VI Syntax and the external interfaces
- References
- Index of language names
- Index
Summary
Tense, aspect, and modality are grammatical categories that occur as functional heads in clause structure. They are traditionally grouped together by virtue of their semantic cohesion and their frequent morphological clustering or fusion. Research in generative syntax has focused on describing the morphosyntactic encoding of features related to temporal meaning, and on accounting for the general properties of tenses that occur in natural language. The tense section outlines empirical generalizations and their generative syntactic description. The term 'aspect' refers to two different layers of temporal information in the predicate phrase: the classification of events according to their temporal properties (stative/non-stative, punctual/durative, telic/atelic); and grammatical aspect, a temporal framework within which the event is located or described. Modality and mood are relational categories that express a mode by which a proposition is anchored to the external context of evaluation.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax , pp. 746 - 792Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
- 17
- Cited by