Tense, Aspect and Temporal Homogeneity

Abstract

By considering the distribution of aspectual meanings and durative temporal adverbials across different verb forms, we discover that temporal homogeneity plays a fundamental role in tense selection in Romance languages. This volume discusses the meaning of temporal verb forms in Romance languages and it proposes a compositional, model-theoretic semantics of tense, aspect and durative temporal adverbials where temporal homogeneity is a key factor for the temporal interpretation of a sentence. In order to bring additional evidence to the temporal homogeneity account, the volume presents results from an empirical study with Italian.