Chapter 2 corrects the tendency to let any serious theory of tense start in 1947 with the publication of Reichenbach (1947). It is absolutely necessary to connect the current theory of tense with classical grammar in order to take into account the aorist or its current descendants. This leads to a discussion of different ternarily organized tense systems as part of a closer inspection of notions like point, interval, fleeting ??, landmark, etc. This prepares the way for showing which sort of role they have in a binary approach. The chapter also gives a sketch of the so-called present perfect puzzle preparing for a solution in Chapter 6.

Chapter 6 aims at accounting for modification by temporal adverbials. The binary approach allows them to operate on different levels of tense structure above S_0. Crucial is the new insight that the relation between modifier A and modified B is not to be expressed as location of A in B but rather as the intersection of A and B. This insight and the flexibility of (deictic) adverbial modification offers the possibility of presenting a structural solution to the Present Perfect puzzle. It also sheds light on the nature of the in/for-test: it explains why terminative sentences with a for-adverbial introduced at a higher level may be regarded as well-formed as opposed to those which require a token interpretation.