Chapter 4 sketches how the contribution of ordinary language philosophers like Ryle, Kenny and Vendler to linguistic semantics has added to persistent terminological confusion. Their delivery of the Aristotelian legacy to linguistics consists of a sort of naive physical ontology at the cost of the principle of compositionality. The misleading translation of Greek verb forms occurring in the crucial passus of Metaphysics 1048b into the English Progressive Form will be argued to have been decisive for what natural (language) philosophy handed to linguists: an outdated vision on motion. The chapter also sketches the heavy work of a verb in taking all sorts of different arguments and argues that features are insufficient for the semantics of tense and aspect: they should be used as abbreviatory and for convenience only.

Chapter 3 presents an updated version of the tense system of Verkuyl (2008) organized on the basis of the three binary oppositions. The update is needed in view of a number of improvements – substantively and notationally – due to later work. The main ingredient of this chapter is the strict distinction between the notion of present domain and the notion of the fleeting point ??, which has a counterpart in the distinction between past domain and then-fleeting point ??’. The parallelism in a binary tense system is argued to be a dominant force in its organization.