The Syntax of Time

Any analysis of the syntax of time is based on a paradox: it must include asyntax-based theory of both tense construal and event construal. Yet while time is undimensional,events have a complex spatiotemporal structure that reflects their human participants. How can anevent be flattened to fit into the linear time axis? Chomsky's The Minimalist Program, published in1995, offers a way to address this problem. The studies collected in The Syntax of Time investigatewhether problems concerning the construal of tense and aspect can be reduced to syntactic problemsfor which the basic mechanism and principles of generative grammar already provide solutions.Thesestudies, recent work by leading international scholars in the field, offer varied perspectives onthe syntax of tense and the temporal construal of events: models of tense interpretation, construalof verbal forms, temporal aspect versus lexical aspect, the relation between the event and itsargument structure, and the interaction of case with aktionsart or tense construal. Advances in thetheory of temporal interpretation in the sentence are also applied to the temporal interpretation ofnominals.

Jaqueline Gueron is Professor of English Linguistics at the Universite Paris III.