The Creation of Tense and Aspect Systems in the Languages of the World

Abstract

A characteristic and universal property of natural languages is the use of grammatical morphemes -morphemes which belong to closed classes and exhibit grammatically regular distributional properties -alongside lexical ones. Grammatical morphemes perform a large share of the work of grammar, for perhaps more than distinctive position (word order), grammatical morphology is the major signal of grammatical and discourse structure, as well as temporal and aspectual relations.The formal properties of grammatical morphemes have been wellstudied and a rich terminology has been developed to deal with differences of expression properties. Thus we have

Person features and syncretism

“…The effect is discussed by many authors, sometimes under the rubric of 'iconicity' (see Zwicky 1978, Aissen 2003, Croft 2003and Haspelmath 2006. For example, languages that make a distinction between past and present tense can mark either both or only the past tense, but will not mark the present tense only (Bybee and Dahl 1989). Similarly, languages that distinguish singular and plural may mark both or just the plural, but they will not mark only the singular (Greenberg 1963, Universal 35).…”

Constructional Idioms, Morphology, and the Dutch Lexicon

“…This appplies to the expression of information with respect to voice, aspect, Aktionsart, and similar categories. This kind of analytic expression is a widespread property of natural languages, as is also clear from the grammaticalization studies in Dahl 1989, andBybee et al 1994. It is the very phenomenon of grammaticalization that makes us expect to find such patterns of analytic expression of grammatical information: lexical words can develop into grammatical words (and these in turn may subsequently develop into bound grammatical morphemes).…”

Reviews

“…Bybee 1985), periphrastic vs. bound tense and aspect verb forms (e.g. Bybee & Dahl 1989), the typology of agreement and case marking (e.g. Nichols 1986) and of action nominal constructions (e.g.…”

“…Clearly, then, these differences must be attributed (at least in part) to the individual categories in these languages. It is interesting to note a certain convergence with functionalist grammatical theory here: For example, Bybee & Dahl 1989 argue that languages do not have 'systems' of tense and aspect categories, but that each category must be studied and understood individually, and Himmelmann 1992 argues that grammaticalization should be seen strictly as the grammaticalization of grammatical items (i.e. functional categories).…”