Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

1.2.3 Approaches to extra-temporal functions of tense and aspect
Characterizations of tense and aspect, even those that are primarily temporally based, frequently
note the pragmatic, modal, and discourse-organization features fundamentally intertwined
with tense and aspect. For example, Comrie (1985) analyzes the Bantu ‘still’
(§7.3.5.3) and ‘not yet’ tenses as combinations of tense presuppositions (e.g. for ‘still’, the
situation held in the past) and tense assertions (e.g. for ‘still’, the situation holds at present).
Caudal & Roussarie (2002) comment that
crosslinguistically speaking, it has been noted that strong connections exist between
aspectual interpretation and evidentiality. . . – so-called constatives of inferentials
are often perfect or resultative morphemes, while testimonials are often
progressives. . . [V]iewpoints should be treated as speech-act devices because they
express the speaker’s stance towards an eventuality he/she wants to refer to
(Caudal & Roussarie 2002:1-2).
Levinson (1983) describes tense, the deictic encoding of (topic) time with respect to the
time of utterance, as having two senses: m-tense (metalinguistic tense) is the purely deictic,
temporal relation of utterance time to other times, and is language independent and
universal. 13 l-tenses (the tenses in a particular language) are a language’s mechanism for
systematically marking time distinctions. While M-tense is “strictly temporal”, L-tenses
“nearly always encode aspectual and modal features” as well, and may not be in a straightforward
one-to-one matching with M-tenses. The particular M-tense distinctions encoded as
L-tenses are language specific and, possibly, culturally dependent (Levinson 1983:77ff ). A
serious question is raised by this analysis: If it is a (near) universal characteristic of languages
to encode more than just temporal relationships in tense and aspect marking, how should
these extra-temporal functions be handled in a theory of tense and aspect? Are they part
of the basic definitions of tense and aspect, or are they somehow secondary, to be analyzed
apart from the core meanings?
Whether these extra-temporal uses are part of the basic definitions of tense and aspect
is another point of contention. This section discusses in greater detail several kinds of
approaches to analyzing the extra-temporal functions of tense and aspect marking, from the
strict temporal views of (e.g.) Reichenbach, to the radical holism of Mental Spaces Theory.
1.2.3.1 Strict temporal approaches
Reichenbach explains the non-correspondence of actual tense to philosophical, logical tense
relations by referencing their “historical origin”: because languages develop tense functions
slowly over time, “we should . . . not be astonished if actual language does not always fit the
schema which we try to construct in symbolic logic”(Reichenbach 1947:298). In other words,
the theory is perfect, but actual languages are not.
Similarly, Comrie (1985) argues that the primary, basic meaning of the past tense is
universally “past time reference”, and that deviations from these – for example, the use
13 It seems this would hold even for languages without obligatory grammatical tense marking.
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