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Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to express a temporal structure, and Henk Verkuyl presents a unified formal system to account for them. He explains aspectuality in terms of the opposition between terminative aspect and durative aspect, and describes the way in which terminative aspect is compositionally formed on the basis of semantic information expressed by different syntactic elements, in particular the verb and its arguments. The aim is to determine which semantic conditions make a sentence terminative; but at least ten different forms of durative aspectuality are also treated. All are drawn into a theory which can account for both terminative and durative aspectuality together. A Theory of Aspectuality draws together into a coherent whole the author's thinking on the subject over the last twenty years, and will interest all those working on aspect and the semantics of noun phrases. It promises to be a major new contribution to our understanding of the subject.

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The present paper adopts as its point of departure the claim by Te Winkel (1866) and Verkuyl (2008) that mental temporal representations are built on the basis of three binary oppositions: Present/Past, Synchronous/Posterior and Imperfect/Perfect. Te Winkel took the second opposition in terms of the absence or presence of a temporal auxiliary zullen 'will'. However, in a binary system Future loses the status it has in a ternary analysis as being at the same level as Past and Present. The present paper shows that Present and Past already may express posterior information, there being no temporal role for zullen 'will'. Grice's Maxim of Quantity determines which sort of interpretation (current or posterior) is to be associated with Present or Past. The infinitival form of zullen 'will' should be seen as an epistemic modal operator with a specific role in the interaction between speaker and hearer. This operator will be argued to be positioned between the first and the third opposition. The binary approach is not restricted to Dutch and so it points to a fundamental flaw in Kissine (2008) which proposed that the English auxiliary will is (only) temporal.

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ABSTRACT. The present paper aims at accounting for the Spanish Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto and the Indefinido by applying three binary tense oppositions: Present vs Past, Synchronous vs Posterior and Imperfect(ive) vs Perfect(ive). For the sixteen Spanish tense forms under analysis a binary approach leads to covering twelve of them. Their relation with the preterital forms outside the range of the three oppositions is accounted for by two surgical operations: (a) the notion of Imperfect(ive) is severed from the notion of ongoing progress by restricting it to underinformation about completion and by seeing continuous tense forms as involving a more complex semantics; (b) the notion of (non-)stative is strictly severed from interference of information coming from the arguments of a verb. These theoretical moves make the way free for a formal-semantic insight into the interaction of Spanish tense and aspect. It also paves the way for a principled distinction between completion and anteriority. Restricted to tense forms pertaining to the past, our analysis sheds light on the struggle for survival of tense forms outside the binary system. Keywords: tense, aspect, perfecto, pluscuamperfecto, imperfecto, indefinido, completion, aorist, anteriority, stative, nonstative, discrete, continuous, progressive, terminative, durative RESUMEN. El presente trabajo pretende describir y explicar las siguientes formas verbales del castellano: Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto e Indefinido aplicando tres oposiciones temporales binarias: Presente vs Pasado, Sincrónico vs Posterior e Imperfecto/imperfectivo vs Perfecto/perfectivo. Este acercamiento binario cubre doce de las dieciséis formas temporales del castellano analizadas. La relación entre las formas verbales que entran en el sistema binario y las formas de pretérito que no entran en el sistema se explica por dos operaciones quirúrgicas: (a) la noción de Imperfecto/imperfectivo se separa de la noción de progresivo continuo, restringiendo el valor del Imperfecto/imperfectivo a la subinformación sobre su terminación e implicando una semántica más compleja para las formas temporales progresivas; (b) la noción de (no) estatividad está estrictamente separada de la interferencia de la información aspectual procedente de los argumentos de un verbo. Estos movimientos teóricos dan vía libre a una comprensión formal-semántica de la interacción del tiempo y del aspecto en castellano. También allana el camino para una distinción argumentada entre las nociones de terminación y anterioridad. Limitado a formas verbales del pasado, nuestro análisis ilumina la batalla por la supervivencia de las formas temporales fuera del sistema binario.