Grammatical morphemes are used to modulate word meanings and to link words in constructions. They consist of inflections, usually suffixes, added to words, and free-standing function words (prepositions and articles). Different language-types make different uses of these, including cases added to each noun, tense and aspect markers added to each verb, and agreement markers linking nouns, adjectives, and determiners. Children have to identify each inflection, its meaning, and where it is used on each word class. They start to add modulations to their words as soon as they start to combine words (and may understand some of them before this). They use regular forms as their starting point and over-regularize irregular forms. They show some consistency in the order of acquisition for different modulations, depending on the semantic complexity of each grammatical morpheme. Semantic complexity, formal complexity, and frequency all play a role here. Children may initially rely on filler-syllables, and only later produce the relevant form. Word class plays a role here, since the choice of grammatical morphemes depends on this. Initial use of grammatical morphemes may be limited to specific words and only later extended. The same holds for agreement in gender and number.

This chapter provides an overview of the inventory, formation, and use of synthetic and periphrastic tense and mood forms in modern Belarusian, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Lower and Upper Sorbian, and Ukrainian. It addresses both characteristics common to all modern languages and features of individual languages.

Chapter 3 explores verbal group system and structure. In doing so for English and Spanish, it concentrates on what in SFL is referred to as univariate structure. Univariate structures are structures involving a single variable, which is repeated over and over again; they thus function as the realisation of recursive systems. The unit complexes introduced above (clause complexes, group complexes, word complexes and morpheme complexes) are structures of this kind. And some languages develop more delicate clause and group systems organised along these lines. The recursive tense systems in English and Spanish which we describe in this chapter are good examples. Chinese verbal groups on the other hand do not involve recursive systems realised by iterating structures and so have to be approached from a multivariate perspective.

In Stage 5, the journey moves to meaning relations within sentences, introducing such topics of quantification (including generalized quantifiers), representing events and states, temporal, aspectual, and modal distinctions in semantics, and propositional attitude reports.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

We defend an acquaintance-based semantics for ‘de re’ attitude reports. We begin by surveying the philosophical literature on the logical form of the ‘de re’, with particular attention to how acquaintance relations solve the problem posed by so-called double vision scenarios. We reject the view that cognitive contact with the ‘res’ requires causal interaction: the causal conception of acquaintance is inadequately motivated in the philosophical literature on the ‘de re’. We then turn to other linguistic data. We show that the ‘de re’ analysis is needed to account for certain tense constructions. The success of this application provides a further reason to reject an exclusively causal conception of acquaintance, since the kind of cognitive contact relevant to ‘de re’ attitudes towards times cannot plausibly be causal. We discuss objections to the ‘de re’ analysis of tense, such as the apparent unavailability of double vision scenarios involving times. We consider various additional principles and constraints that further refine the theory’s predictions, and conclude that while further research is needed to fully vindicate the ‘de re’ analysis in this application, it offers the most unified and well-motivated account of the embedded tense data currently on offer.

Case theory is a theoretical tool in the generative grammar to capture generalizations regarding categorial distribution, particularly the nominal category in relation to others. The notion of case can describe the close relation between grammatical categories, such as a verb/preposition and its object, or the subject of a sentence and the tense or agreement of the sentence. This chapter reviews the advantages of adopting the notion of abstract case in Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Data and issues discussed include how the challenges Chinese poses to the word order correlations proposed as universals or tendencies in typological studies cease to be problems if the notion of abstract case interacts with word order universals, what the postverbal structure constraint is in Chinese, and how Case plays a role in the analysis, whether there are true pre-nominal PPs in Chinese, and whether tensed and non-tensed clauses can be distinguished in Chinese, as well as the role of case in capturing the behavior of clauses.

A passage at 1048b18–35 in chapter six of Metaphysics Book Θ, forging a distinction between activities Aristotle classes as energeia, actuality, and those he calls kinesis, change, has become a favourite subject of discussion by analytic philosophers. This chapter argues that this now celebrated section does not fit into the overall programme of Θ, was not written for Θ, and should not be printed in the place we read it today. It is an isolated fragment of uncertain origin. Although there is good reason to accept that it is authentic Aristotle, its focus is rather different from what it is usually taken to be. Moreover, the distinction is unique in the corpus, and should not be imported into other Aristotelian contexts such as Nicomachean Ethics X or De Anima II.5. The chapter first documents the passage’s anomalous standing within the manuscript tradition. It then argues that Aristotle’s focus here is on verbal aspect, not tense. Next corruptions in the transmitted text are discussed, in light of the hypothesis that the passage was originally imported as a marginal annotation, and a revised text is proposed. Finally, the uniqueness of its philosophical content is established. It is a freak performance.

Hausa retains the widespread Chadic three-term system of masculine singular, feminine singular, and plural (gender neutral). This is reflected in nominal forms and in agreement patterns. With a few grammatical morphemes, e.g. the Linker (na/ta/na) the masculine singular and the plural share the same marker. Tense–Aspect–Mood (TAM) is generally indicated by an overt marker after the subject pronoun and before the verb. The finaln in the Completive paradigm is not a TAM marker as often said, but rather a plural formative. The marker in the Subjunctive is zero. This form historically also indicated the Aorist, which still occurs but in the negative only. The causative is and was formed syntactically using a main verb sâa ‘to cause’ (lit. ‘to put’) and not by means of a morphological extension on the verb. Indirect objects have changed significantly from Old Hausa, in word order, in the form of the marker(s), and in the specific pronouns used. Verbs in the grade system vary in their pre-indirect object usage. Reflexives are built on the noun ‘head’, the question being whether they originally might have employed ‘body’ instead, which is now found in reciprocals.

The introduction discusses the relationship between grammatical tense and the conceptualisation of time. It then presents an overview of the argument of each of the book's chapters. A discussion follows of aspects of Mental Spaces Theory, with special attention paid to the concepts of the 'ground' and of 'representation'. Points of the Classical Greek tense and aspect system are discussed.

The use of the present tense to refer to past events may depend on two conceptual scenarios. First, the speaker may be mentally displaced to the past. Second, the speaker may pretend that the past events are currently accessible in the form of a representation. This 'representation' scenario is generally the most economic conceptual explanation for the use of the present tense to refer past events. Examples are discussed to illustrate the argument: passages from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's schooldays; narratives accompanying security camera footage; a narrative by a character in an episode of Seinfeld; and passages from Thucydides. In all these cases the use of the present tense to refer to past events can be made sense of in terms of a conceptual representation scenario, where the difference lies in the exact nature of the representation. The more concrete the representation, the stronger the tendency for the speaker to use the present tense to designate the described events.

Verbs combine with other words to form verb phrases (VP), which are the heads of most clauses. A typical clause is a subject and a head VP. English verbs typically have more variety in their forms than other English words, reflecting grammatical categories like tense, person, and number, though these forms can sometimes look and sound the same. Most also have the secondary forms, namely gerund-participle, past participle, and plain form. A special group of verbs with distinctive properties is the auxiliary verbs, including the modal auxiliaries.

Semantically speaking, situations such as actions and states have perfective and imperfective interpretations, which are expressed in clauses and depend largely on the head verb, along with its tense and aspect. English has two past tenses (preterite & perfect), one present tense, and no future tense. The preterite and present are the primary tenses. There are two aspects, progressive and non-progressive. The modal auxiliaries specialize in expressing modality, which relates to how the possible situations described in a clause can reflect reality. There’s also a special irrealis form of be for expressing counterfactuals.

In this chapter students are exposed to various kinds of inflectional processes in the languages of the world. We start with a review of the distinction between inflection and derivation. We then look at the inflectional categories of number, person, gender and noun class, case, tense and aspect, voice, mood and modality, evidentiality and mirativity. We look at the sorts of inflection we find in English and consider why English has so little inflection. We then turn to the concepts of the paradigm and of inflectional classes, and look at the sorts of relations that are found in paradigms (syncretism, suppletion, defectiveness, overabundance). Students learn the distinction between inherent and contextual inflection. The chapter ends with a brief ‘how-to’ on the analysis of inflection.

Here we round up three topics not covered elsewhere in the book. The first is embedded tense, which gives rise to two main puzzles: sequence of tense (embedded past tense that seems not to be interpreted) and double access (embedded present tense that seems to be anchored both to the utterance time and to the matrix evaluation time). We discuss theories of tense in attitude reports that grapple with these puzzles. The second topic is Neg Raising: sometimes, a negated attitude report seems to be interpreted as though the negation were embedded in the complement clause (e.g., a salient reading of Beatrix doesn’t think it’s raining is Beatrix thinks that it’s not raining). We discuss syntactic solutions (negation is pronounced high but interpreted low) as well as semantic/pragmatic solutions (the unexpected interpretation is the result of a semantic or pragmatic inference). Finally, the third topic is intensional transitive verbs, which create attitude reports with ordinary direct objects rather than complement clauses (e.g., Beatrix wants a frisbee or Beatrix is looking for Polly). We discuss the implications of such sentences for the status of intensionality in grammar.