Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect

This comprehensive examination of tense and grammatical aspect provides fascinating insight into how languages indicate distinctions of time. Providing an in-depth survey of the scholarship from the ancient Greeks through the 1980s, Time and the Verb explains and evaluates every major issue and theory, concentrating on familiar Classical and modern European languages. An invaluable reference tool as well as a major contribution to the history of linguistic sciences, this book will be the standard against which future work on tense and aspect is measured.

This is the first thoroughly comprehensive study of tense and aspect, linguistic markers signifying relations in time. Tense and aspect have been peculiarly resistant to linguistic classification and explanation. There continue to be many competing theories, many different terminologies, and considerable controversy and confusion surrounding these evidently universal linguistic phenomena. Robert Binnick's work will enable students, teachers, and scholars to understand th use of verb forms in particular languages.