Cross-linguistic semantics of tense, aspect, and modality (review)

Just ten years ago, natural language semantics and typology seemed separate worlds. While typological studies needed semantic and syntactic terminology for the categorization of phenomena in languages, neither semantics nor syntax seemed to offer directly the concepts that were typologically most useful. This was a pity since comparative classification of languages in semantic terms can be rather vague unless backed up by a sound understanding of what matters in how human communication functions.

By contrast, much of natural language semantics has been developed in the tradition of philosophical logic, seeking logical analyses of what seem to be the natural language counterparts of quantifiers, connectives, and modal and temporal operators, as well as solving logical puzzles that arise around other expressions. Until recently, however, all of this has largely been ignorant of the fact that natural language meanings are the product of complex and unfinished grammaticalization processes pulled by expressive needs and pushed by similarities between target uses and source uses.

In this volume, the gap between typologists and semanticists seems to have narrowed. The editors must have played an important role here: they are a typologist (Malchukov), a semanticist (Hogeweg), and a combination of both (de Hoop). Their introduction supplies a more substantive overview of the volume than the present review can give. Tense, aspect, and modality (TAM), which have been intensively studied in both fields, play an important role in the volume.

The contributions in the volume fall into several groups: typological studies (van der Auwera, Kehayov, and Vittrant), TAM markers in a particular language (Tamm; Romeo; Davis, Matthewson, and Rullmann), new attempts at providing a semantics for aspect marking and its interaction with tense (Bary; Arkadiev), a new look at old typological semantic features (irrealis: van Gijn and Gipper, subjunctive: Marques), a new look at old semantics using typology (Nauze; Tatevosov and Ivanov; Partee and Borschev), and three attempts at methodological innovation in the interaction between typology and semantics (Malchukov; Foolen and de Hoop; and de Schepper and Zwarts).

Johan van der Auwera, Petar Kehayov, and Alice Vittrant give an important historical amendment on the semantic map of modality (van der Auwera & Plungian 1998) by studying the development from verbs of acquisition (e.g. get) to modal markers. They note changes from universal to existential operators and vice versa and maintain that ability can be avoided as a source of circumstantial and deontic operators.

Anne Tamm provides a full treatment of evidential partitives in Estonian, working out the relation between verbal and object partitives (the latter as markers of incomplete events, as in Finnish). Nicoletta Romeo describes grammaticalized uses of the verbs ‘come’ and ‘go’ in Burmese as inchoative markers and transitivity markers. Henry Davis, Lisa Matthewson, and Hotze Rullmann give a full treatment of the verbal marker ka-…-a in St’at’imcets (Lillooet Salish) and make it fit the pattern of other modal markers in the language, that is, as an expression of both universal and existential circumstantial modality, thus modifying the older analysis as an ‘out of control marker’.

Corien Bary argues against de Swart’s (1998) treatment of the distinction between passé simple and imparfait in French by comparing it in detail with the very similar contrast between aorist and imperfect in Ancient Greek, arguing against her coercion approach. Peter M. Arkadiev closely examines aspect in Adyghe and concludes that temporal adverbs will play an important third role next to the semantics of the predicate argument structure and the aspectual operators. Additionally, the contribution by Sergei Tatevosov and Mikhail Ivanov is relevant to the semantics of aspect.

Rik van Gijn and Sonja Gipper reanalyze the traditional notion of the irrealis as a contiguous concept centered around counterfactuality. Languages can express possibility without speaker commitment and even part of factuality (the part without...