ABSTRACT
The lexical content of a clause has no place on the time axis. Hence, it bears no direct temporal relation to any other lexical content, nor to a distinguished subsegment of time, like the time of utterance. It is not part of that structure which we call time. But it can be embedded in time – it can be hooked up to some time span, the topic time TT, which in turn stands in a temporal relationship to other time spans. This is what happens in an utterance: it brings together a TT and a lexical content. This ‘lexical content embedded in time’ is a selective description of a situation which occupies a certain time span, the situation time TSit. What we understand TSit to be in a given case depends on three factors:
the position of TT to which the situation in question is linked;
the temporal characteristics of this situation as it is described by the lexical content: is it a temporary or a non-temporary content, and in the former case, is it a 1-state or a 2-state content?
the particular way in which the situation is linked to the given TT.
It is this latter point which we shall examine in this chapter: aspect. Aspects are ways to relate the time of situation to the topic time: TT can precede TSit, it can follow it, it can contain it, or be partly or fully contained in it. In principle, all temporal relations definable by the ‘Basic Time Concept’ (BTC, from section 4.2) could be used as aspects. In practice, however, languages only choose a very selected subset of these relations for their systems of aspect marking. It is useful to distinguish three main possibilities:TSit is interpreted as fully including TT (abbreviated TT incl TSit).
TSit is interpreted as partly including TT (abbreviated TT at TSit).
TSit is interpreted as excluding TT (abbreviated TT ex TSit).
As defined in section 4.2, incl is ‘fully included in’. The relation at is an abbreviation for the partly before or partly after, and ex is an abbreviation for not at and not incl. These three relations may be refined again, for example ex may be split into after and before. This will be discussed below.