The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages

Astrid De Wit

2016년 10월 · Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought 4권 · Oxford University Press

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This book presents an analysis of how speakers of typologically diverse languages report present-time situations. It begins from the assumption that there is a restriction on the use of the present tense to report present-time dynamic/perfective situations, while with stative/imperfective situations there are no such alignment problems. Astrid De Wit brings together cross-linguistic observations from English, French, the English-based creole language Sranan, and various Slavic languages, and relates them to the same phenomenon, the 'present perfective paradox'. The proposed analysis is founded on the assumption that there is an epistemic alignment constraint preventing the identification and reporting of events in their entirety at the time of speaking. This book discusses the various strategies that the aforementioned languages have developed to resolve this conceptual difficulty, and demonstrates that many of the features of their tense-aspect systems can be regarded as the result of this conflict resolution. It also offers cognitively plausible explanations for the conceptual structures underlying the interactions attested between tense and aspect.

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Astrid De Wit holds a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Antwerp (2014). She spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles under a grant from the National Fund for Scientific Research. She has published widely on tense, aspect, and modality in a variety of languages, and her work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Studies in Language, and Journal of Germanic Linguistics.