Tense and Aspect in Indo-European Languages: Theory, Typology, Diachrony (review)

This is an important study, both for the conceptual framework it proposes for the analysis of tense and aspect and for the wealth of data it discusses. As stated by the authors in a preface, the volume is the outgrowth of a PhD seminar. This accounts for the comprehensiveness of the survey undertaken of the various Indo-European languages and also for the somewhat speculative quality of some of the analyses. By this I mean that it is an excellently integrated and coordinated effort involving many scholars rather than the product of extensive refinement and readjustment of analyses by a few scholars over a long period of research. The clarity of the general exposition far outweighs the residual unclarities in some specific analyses.

Ch. 1 establishes the tense-aspect descriptive framework, called ‘chronogenesis’, positing basic cognitive notions of time relations and event perspectives and how they map onto various morphological systems. Some innovative terminology is used, based on the tense/aspect theory of the early twentieth century French linguist Gustave Guillaume (applied to Classical Greek and Latin), but some of the unclarities and incoherencies of that theory are eliminated. While the framework is tailored for IE languages, its explicit cognitive underpinnings and the method of mapping, as proposed by the authors, imply that the framework is not limited to any particular language family. Therefore, the interest of the work goes beyond IE to TA systems in general.

Nevertheless, since the theory is systematically applied exclusively to IE in the book, it is within the analysis of the variety of systems in IE that its more general applicability can be appreciated here. In this vein, the framework is successful in allowing revealing comparisons across IE languages and avoiding confusions of traditional terminology applied to those languages, e.g. preterit, aorist, imperfect, etc.—used differently for different languages. With regard to utility for cross-linguistic typological comparisons, the ensuing Chs. 2–12 are organized into larger sections; (A) ‘Languages with the original three-aspect system’ (Ch. 2, Ancient Greek; Ch. 3, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit); (B) ‘Languages with the original present-aorist system and innovative perfect’ (Ch. 4, Classical Armenian; Ch. 5, Old Church Slavic; Ch. 6, Albanian; Ch. 7, Tocharian); (C) ‘Languages with a three-tense system’ (Ch. 8, Baltic; Ch. 9, Celtic; Ch. 10, Latin); (D) ‘Languages which merged the original aorist and perfect into preterit’ (Ch. 11, Germanic: Gothic, Old English; Ch. 12, Anatolian: Hittite). Note that the traditional terms featured in the section headings are used interchangeably with innovative terminology in the text, e.g. ‘aorist’ = ‘perfective past’, probably as a convenient habit in addressing IEists.

The above section headings also presuppose a reconstruction of the Proto-IE tense-aspect system, e.g. with three aspects. The book does not explicitly reconstruct the entire system but suggests basic parts of it on the basis of the trajectories of the attested historical systems. Sometimes I got the impression that the authors are figuring out the PIE system as they write, e.g. hesitation in whether certain aspects of the Hittite system are innovative or conservative (243ff). This is understandable given the huge amount of data involved in PIE TA reconstruction, and it is even helpful to understanding to see the process of reconstruction carried out rather than having a presentation of the results of that process with less attention paid to the problems encountered along the way. Incomplete programmatic observations include such matters as incipient ergativity in Tokharian, and the differences between aorist vs. perfect usage in the original (New Testament) Greek sources and Old Armenian translations (cf. the title of Section B given above).

Section E, ‘Later developments’, contains Ch. 13, ‘From Ancient to Modern Greek’; Ch. 14, ‘Development of the modern Indic tense-aspect system’; Ch. 15, ‘Development of the Modern Slavic tense-aspect system’; Ch. 16, ‘Development of the Modern Iranian tense-aspect system’; Ch. 17, ‘From...