ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates, contra the epigraph from Sapir, that the English tense and aspect system may be comprehensively and systematically treated. A similar discussion of English aspect is found in Laurel Smith; however, her work on English and other languages differs from several respects. First, she treats lexical aspect as clusters of equipollent feature values. Second, her grammatical aspect refers to a situation structure independent of lexical aspect features, with initial, final, and medial event stages. Third, she does not discuss tense. The chapter disagrees with several particulars in Smith's analysis, including her classification of simple tense forms as perfective. It provides English examples of the lexical aspect classes, and demonstrates that the members of each class show the expected range of interpretations made available by any unmarked features. The chapter explores that each of the lexical aspect classes exhibit the predicted alternations, allowing multiple interpretations of unmarked features.
