Tense and Aspect

When studying the two concepts of tense and aspect linguists have commonly kept apart their semantic and syntactic properties. The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, and suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework. They compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones, allowing them to hypothesize principles of universal grammar related to tense and aspect, as well as explain language-specific phenomena.